When the last rail of the “Cape-to-Cairo” is laid, and the last spike driven, its builders may say, without fear of contradiction, “In all the world no road like this.” And in the nature of things it is impossible that there can ever be its like again, for there will be no more continents to open up, no more frontiers to conquer. It will start on the sandy shores of the Mediterranean and end under the shadow of Table Mountain. In between, it will pass through jungle, swamp, and desert; it will zigzag across plains where elephants play by day and lions roar by night; it will corkscrew up the slopes of snow-capped mountains, meander through the cultivated patches of strange inland tribes, stride long-legged athwart treacherous, pestilential swamps, plough through the darkness of primeval forests, and stretch its length across the rolling, wind-swept veldt, until it finally ends in the great antipodean metropolis on the edge of the Southern Ocean. On its way it traverses nearly seventy degrees of latitude, samples every climate, touches every degree of temperature, experiences every extreme. At Gondokoro, in the swamp-lands of the Sudd, the red-fezzed engine-driver will lean gasping from his blistered cab; at Kimberley, in the highlands of the Rand, he will stamp with numbed feet and blow with chattering teeth on his half-frozen fingers. The traveller who climbs into the Cape-to-Cairo Limited at the Quay Station in Alexandria, in response to the conductor's cry of “All aboard! All aboard for Cape Town!” can lean from the window of his compartment as the train approaches Cairo and see the misty outlines of the Pyramids, those mysterious monuments of antiquity which were hoary with age when London was a cluster of mud huts and Paris was yet to be founded in the swamps beside the Seine; at Luxor he will pass beneath the shadow of ruined Thebes, a city beside which Athens and Rome are ludicrously modern; at Assuan he will catch a glimpse of the greatest dam ever built by man—a mile and a quarter long and built of masonry weighing a million tons—holding in check the waters of the longest river in the world; at Khartoum, peering through the blue-glass windows which protect the passengers' eyes from the blinding sun glare, he can see the statue of Gordon, seated on his bronze camel, peering northward across the desert in search of the white helmets that came too late; at Entebbe his eyes will be dazzled by the shimmering waters of the Victoria Nyanza, barring Lake Superior the greatest of all fresh-water seas; at Ujiji he will see natives in German uniforms drilling on the spot where Stanley discovered Livingstone. He will hold his breath in awe as the train rolls out over the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, for there will lie below him the mightiest cataract in the world—an unbroken sheet of falling, roaring, smoking water, two and a half times the height and ten times the width of the American Fall at Niagara; at Kimberley he will see