Finally there is the Cape-to-Cairo Railway which, passing through the Katanga mining districts, is likely to divert still more of the traffic Germany had counted upon alike for her Tanganyikabahn and as a means towards the attainment of her political aspirations in Central Africa. Whilst these various developments were proceeding, there were still others, in the Cameroons, to which attention may now be directed. THE CAMEROONS, LAKE CHAD AND THE SUDAN Anticipations of the great results for Germany which would follow from the building of railways in the Cameroons began to be entertained about the year 1897. The main objective of the schemes brought forward seems to have been, however, not simply the internal economic development of an already vast area, but the carrying of lines of communication to the furthest limits of that area in order, apparently, to extend German interests and influence to territories beyond. One of these schemes was for the building of a line of railway from Duala, the chief port of the Cameroons, to Lake Chad (otherwise Tsâd), a sheet of water some 7,000 square miles in extent which, situate on the western borders of the Sudan, constitutes the extreme northern limits of German territory in this direction, while the shores of the lake are occupied jointly by Germany, England and France. The proposed line was to have an estimated total length of about 1,000 kilometres (621 miles). In September, 1902, the German Imperial Government granted to a Kamerun-Eisenbahn-Syndikat a concession for building the line; an expedition sent out by the syndicate made a survey of the route in 1902-3; and a Kamerun-Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, with a capital of 17,000,000 marks (£850,000), was formed by a group of bankers and others in Germany to build the first section. In December, 1903, the German Emperor, at his reception of the President of the Reichstag, gave his blessing to all such enterprises by declaring that an essential condition ("eine Lebensbedingung") for the welfare of Germany's colonies in Africa was that the building of railways should be taken earnestly in hand. In 1905 the prospects of the proposed line seemed so hopeful that the early commencement of construction was announced as probable; but various difficulties arose, including much trouble in regard to labour, and the line did not get beyond the end of its first stage, a distance of only 160 km. (100 miles) from the coast. Although the scheme was thus not fully carried out, there was no doubt as to the nature of the purposes it had been designed to serve. In his official and detailed account of the proposed undertaking[69]--a book of exceptional merit from the point of view of the clearness and of the exhaustive data with which "the case for the line" is presented--the director of the syndicate says:--