From the Cairo end, meanwhile, the northern section of the great transcontinental system was being pushed steadily, if slowly, southward. The difficulties of river transportation experienced by the two Sudanese expeditions had proved conclusively that if the Sudan was ever to be opened up to European exploitation it must be by rail rather than by river. It was the Khalifa who was unconsciously responsible for the rapid completion of much of the Sudanese section of the “Cape-to-Cairo,” for, in order to come to hand-grips with him, Kitchener and his soldiers pushed the railway down the desert to Khartoum at record speed, laying close on two miles of track between each sunrise and sunset. There it halted for a number of years; but after the British had done their work, and Khartoum had been transformed from a town of blood, lust, and fanaticism into a city with broad, shaded streets, along which stalks law and order in the khaki tunic of a Sudanese policeman, the railway-building fever, which affects some men as irresistibly as the _Wanderlust_ does others, took hold of Those Who Have the Say, and the line was again pushed southward, along the banks of the Blue Nile, to Sennar, one hundred and fifty-eight miles south of Khartoum. With the completion, in 1910, of several iron bridges, it was advanced to Kosti, a post on the White Nile, with the northern end of Lake Tanganyika some twelve hundred miles away. That a few more years will see the northern section extending southward, via Gondokoro, to Lake Victoria Nyanza, and the southern section northward to Lake Tanganyika, there is little doubt. Indeed, the plans are drawn, the routes mapped, the levels run, and on the Katanga-Tanganyika section the railway-builders are even now at work. But when the Victoria Nyanza has been reached by the one section, and Tanganyika by the other, there will come a halt, for between the two rail-heads there will still be six hundred miles of intervening territory—and that territory is German.