To-day one can travel on an admirably ballasted road-bed, in an electric-lighted sleeping-car, with hot and cold running water in your compartment, and with a dining-car ahead, along that entire stretch of the Barbary Coast lying between the Moroccan and Tripolitanian frontiers, which, within the memory of our fathers, was the most notorious pirate stronghold in the world. A strategic line has been built six hundred miles southward from the coast city of Oran to Colomb-Bechar, in the Sahara, with Timbuktu as its eventual destination, and, now that the long-standing Moroccan controversy has been settled for good and all, another railway is already being pushed forward from Ujda, on the Algerian-Moroccan border, and in another year or two the shriek of the locomotive will be heard under the walls of Fez the Forbidden. From Constantine, in Algeria, another line of rails is crawling southward via Biskra into the Sahara, with Lake Tchad as its objective, thus opening up to European commerce the great protected states of Kanem and Wadai. From Dakar, on the coast of Senegal, a combined rail and river service is in operation to the Great Bend of the Niger, so that one can now go to the mysterious city of Timbuktu by train and river steamer, in considerable comfort and under the protection of the French flag all the way. In Dahomey, within the memory of all of us a notorious cannibal kingdom, a railway is under construction to Nikki, four hundred miles into the steaming jungle; from Konakry, the capital of French Guinea, a line has just been opened to Kourassa, three hundred and fifty miles from anywhere; while even the fever-stricken, voodoo-worshipping Ivory Coast boasts two hundred miles or so of well-built line with its rail-head already half-way from the coast to Jimini. From Tamatave, the chief seaport of Madagascar, you can go by rail to the capital, Antanarivo, three hundred miles up into the mountains, and, if you wish to continue across the island, government motor-cars will run you down, over roads that would make the Glidden tourists envious, to Majunga, on the other side. From Djibouti, the capital of the French Somali Coast, another railway has been pushed as far up-country as Diré-Dawah, in Menelik's dominions (fare sixty dollars for the round trip of two hundred and fifty miles), thus diverting the lucrative trade of Abyssinia from the British Sudan to the French marts in Somaliland.