The last frontier : $b The white man's war for civilisation in AfricaPowell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
History
The last frontier : $b The white man's war for civilisation in Africa
Powell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
Africa; Africa -- Colonization
In the heart of the jungle in Northeastern Rhodesia near the Congo
border. This is the sort of country through which portions of the
“Cape-to-Cairo” railway will pass.]
Highways of steel bisect Rhodesia in both directions. From Plumtree,
on the borders of Bechuanaland, the Rhodesian section of the
great Cape-to-Cairo system stretches straight across the country
to Bwana M'kubwa, on the Congo frontier, while another line, the
Rhodesia, Mashonaland, and Beira, links up, as its name indicates,
the transcontinental system with the East Coast. Though the
much-advertised Zambezi Express is scarcely the “veritable train de
luxe” which the railway folders call it, it is a comfortable enough
train nevertheless, with electric-lighted dining and sleeping cars,
the latter being fitted, as befits a dusty country, with baths. The
dining-car tariff is on a sliding scale; the farther up-country you
travel the higher the prices ascend. Between Cape Town and Mafeking
the charges for meals seemed to me exceedingly reasonable (fifty cents
for breakfast, sixty cents for luncheon, and seventy-five cents for
dinner); between Mafeking and Bulawayo they are only moderate; between
Bulawayo and the Zambezi they are high; and north of the Zambezi—when
you can get any food at all—the charges for it are exorbitant. When
the section to Lake Tanganyika is completed only a millionaire can
afford to enter the dining-car. It speaks volumes for the development
of British South Africa, however, that one can get into a sleeping-car
in Cape Town and get out of it again, six days later, on the navigable
head-waters of the Congo, covering the distance of nearly two thousand
five hundred miles at a total cost of eighty dollars—and much of it
through a country which has been opened to the white man scarcely a
dozen years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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