At Konia, anciently Iconium, we reached the junction of the Anatolia and the Bagdad Railways. From an economic and military standpoint, both roads are of supreme importance to the Ottoman Empire. They supply commerce with long needed means of communication between the interior and the seaboard, and enable the Sultan to conduct the administration of his extensive territory with far more efficiency and despatch than was before possible. Politically, however, the Bagdad Railway is incomparably still more important. No great railroad has ever attracted more attention; none has ever owed so much to its name; none has ever so fired the imagination of Germans and Ottomans; and none has ever so exhausted the resources of diplomacy or provoked greater struggles for its control. Historically both roads have a special interest to the student and the historian not only on account of the classic lands through which they pass but also on account of the long and strenuous efforts which several rival nations made to obtain from the Sublime Porte the authorization to build and operate the great road which was to unite the West and the East. So greatly has the Bagdad Railway modified the Near Eastern Question, so completely has it changed the data and the consequent solution of the problem, and so perfectly does its history dovetail into the narrative of our journey, that a brief account of the origin and struggling beginnings of the road is necessary to a clear conception of many things that shall be said in subsequent chapters. Many and diverse, as the ambitions of those who gave them birth, have been the projects to unite by rail the superb capital on the Bosphorus with the mysterious city of Harun-al-Rashid on the distant Tigris. Two-thirds of a century ago there were few projects which were proposed with more insistence to the British Cabinet and to the House of Commons as well as to English capitalists than that which had for its object the construction of a railway which, starting from a point on the Mediterranean, should cross Mesopotamia in the direction of India. The original plan called for an overland route which would connect the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf. It was based on an elaborate survey of the Euphrates valley, which had been made by an English officer, Colonel Chesney, in 1835–1837. The primary object was to shorten the journey from England to India, which was then made across the Isthmus of Suez, or round the Cape of Good Hope.