And this has been achieved not in one isolated spot near the coast, where material and transport were ready to hand, but at every “white post” up here in the very heart of the black continent, cut off until a few years ago from the capital and the seaboard by that deadly, costly barrier—the white man’s cemetery of the Cataract caravan road. How has it been done? Let us take Irebu as a typical case. Seven years ago a young Belgian lieutenant, Jeuniaux by name, was sent out to take charge of the military training camp at the junction of the Ubanghi, the Congo, and the Tumba Canal, on the site of a former larger and flourishing native village. He came, and he found an unhealthy and pestilential swamp covered with the ruins and the filth of the then almost deserted village of Irebu. Among these unpleasant surroundings was a large group of ill-kempt and badly constructed mud and thatch huts—the training camp; and here he was doomed to pass at least three years. But he was young and energetic, and had passed unscathed along the latter half of the caravan road in the cataract district, for the railway was then but half completed. He had seen brick houses in other stations, and clean, well-kept, well-arranged little townships. He would have the same. But his first difficulty was that this was a training camp, whither the raw, untutored savage was drafted in his naked ignorance to undergo six months’ tuition only; and, so soon as he had acquired a sufficient training to make him of use to the white man, he was hurried on elsewhere and a new batch of raw material took his place. Jeuniaux had but a hazy notion of architecture, but, unaided, he planned and designed his barracks, and acted as his own foreman, devising quaint methods to construct weather-proof walls and roofs from the materials at hand, and instructing his workers, man by man, in these methods, and that without even the medium of a common language.