To this end British official experts mapped out the stages of the aërial route to Australia from Egypt, via Damascus, Bagdad, Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta, Singapore and Sumatra. Although the successive landing grounds were not ready in time for Captain Ross-Smith's magnificent flight from England to Australia, the information and advice collected by the official surveyors were of inestimable value to him. It is noteworthy that nearly the whole of the proposed airway from Egypt to Australia is over British territory or the sea. The same is true of the proposed route from Cairo to Cape Town. This was planned out very carefully by three parties of military aviators, who covered the whole length of civilized and uncivilized Africa in their search for landing grounds. The absorption of German East Africa by the South African Union makes an all British corridor for aircraft from Cairo to Cape Town, by way of Egypt, the Sudan, British East Africa, British Central Africa, German East Africa, Rhodesia, the Transvaal and Cape Colony. There is an alternative water route over the Nile, the Great Lakes, the Zambezi River and along the coast to Cape Town. Being the junction of the airways to India, Australia and South Africa, Egypt is destined to be the nerve center of an air-linked British Empire, just as the Suez Canal has been its jugular vein. But the laying out of great air routes to the East and South does not complete Britain's plans. She must connect them up with London--a task which is much more complicated from the standpoint of high politics, because it involves routes over the territory of other nations. An aëroplane can fly from London to Cairo via Gibraltar without passing over foreign territory or foreign territorial waters. But the air route would be long and the aërodrome bases great distances apart, in comparison with the proposed land route of two thousand miles across France, down the length of Italy and Greece and across the Mediterranean to Cairo. Such a route necessitates an entente cordiale with the nations of Western Europe, and is one of the reasons why Great Britain can never contemplate easily a loosening of the bonds that now hold together the Allies of Western Europe. The French, for their part, are also thinking of air routes in terms of their colonial possessions. For them the international situation is much the same as for the London-Cairo airway. French pilots need not fly over foreign territory to Algiers or Morocco. A long flight across the Mediterranean, or skirting the west coast of Spain, is a possibility. But Spanish territory is the logical corridor from France to Africa. It was over Spain that a trip was made from Toulouse to Casablanca, the eighteen hundred miles being covered in eleven hours of actual flying. The ordinary postal service takes six days. For direct aërial communication with Syria, also, France must have an entente with several intervening countries.