I am in the Sudan on the northern section of the Cape-to-Cairo railroad. I am in the upper end of Nubia at the railroad station of Halfaya, just opposite Khartum, and as far south of Alexandria as the distance from New York to Denver.

In imagination come with me on the trip from the Mediterranean to Khartum. We shall need four days to go from the sea to the junction of the White and Blue Niles, where I now am, but the journey will for the most part be comfortable and there are interesting sights for at least part of the way. We start at Alexandria, the chief sea-port of the whole valley, and in three hours our train carries us across through the delta to Cairo, for there is frequent and rapid train service between these two chief cities of Egypt.

As we go first class, we must pay three cents a mile. The second-class fare is only half as much as the first, and the third is still cheaper. Every train has first-, second-, and third-class cars. Those of the first, which are divided into compartments, are patronized by tourists and officials. The second-class car is much like the coach of our American train, having an aisle through the centre. These cars are used by merchants, commercial travellers, and well-to-do natives. The third-class cars are cheaply made and their seats are wooden benches. They are always filled with the common Egyptians, and foreigners seldom travel in them. Our tickets are little blue cards with the price printed upon them in English and Arabic. We have to show them to the guard as we enter the train, and they are not examined again until they are taken up at the gates of the station as we go out.

We have some trouble with our baggage, for as usual with Americans, we are loaded with trunks. Only fifty-five pounds can be checked without extra charge, and my trunks often cost me more than my fare. We notice that the English and Egyptian passengers put most of their belongings into bundles and bags, which they can bring into the cars with them. Many a single passenger is carrying four or five valises, each holding as much as a small steamer trunk, and the compartments are half filled with such luggage. Every first-class car has a guard, or porter, who helps us off and on, and there are always fellaheen at the depot ready to carry our effects for five cents apiece.

Most of the Egyptian trains have a small car next to the engine, an express car back of that, and also cars for animals. Our train carries one in which are two blanketed horses, with Egyptian grooms to take care of them. They probably belong to some rich nabob of Cairo, and are going south by express.

The postal cars are carefully watched. The bags of mail are carried to them on red trucks made for the purpose. The trucks are pushed by the Arabs and mail is handled by them; but a dark-faced soldier with rifle and sword marches along to see the bags taken in and out. When a truck is loaded, the soldier goes with it to the post-office wagons. There is always a guard on such Nile steamers as carry mail, and the letters are never left without some armed official to watch over them.

The railroads of Egypt and the Sudan are under the government, and I find both systems pay. Those of Egypt earn about six per cent. on their capital stock and their working expenses are only about seventy-three per cent. of the gross receipts. The business is rapidly increasing. They carry some twenty-six million passengers a year and some five million tons of freight. Egypt now has something like fifteen hundred miles of railroads which belong to the government, and in addition more than seven hundred miles of agricultural roads managed by private parties. The earnings of the latter are increasing, for they carry more freight and passengers from year to year.

The main lines are managed by Egyptian and European officials. The superintendents of departments, who receive three thousand dollars and upward a year each, are mainly Europeans, while the inspectors and sub-inspectors, who get from eighty dollars to two hundred and forty dollars a month, are in the main foreigners. Under these men are the native guards, track workers, and mechanics of various kinds, who receive smaller wages. They are almost all Egyptians, there being some twenty-four hundred of them to about one hundred and fifty Europeans.

The Sudan roads go through a thinly populated country, but the receipts are already considerably more than their working expenses and are rapidly increasing.

The Alexandria-Cairo division of the Cape-to-Cairo road taps one of the richest countries on earth. I mean the delta of Egypt, which is more thickly populated than most other parts of the globe. The distance from Alexandria to Cairo is one hundred and thirty-three miles, and all the way is through rich farm lands. There is no desert in sight until you reach Cairo. Cotton is piled up at every depot, there are vast loads of it on the canals which the track crosses, and at the stations cars of cotton bales fill the side tracks.

The next division above Cairo goes to Asyut, which is two or three hundred miles farther south. Then comes the road from Asyut to Luxor, ending with the narrow-gauge line from Luxor to Aswan. These divisions are through the narrow part of the Nile valley, with the desert in sight all the time. The river winds this way and that, but the railroad is comparatively straight, and is often far off from the river amid the sand and rocks. Such parts of the line are uncomfortable going. At times the sands are blinding, the dust fills the cars, and our eyes smart. These discomforts are somewhat less in the first-class cars. All of them have shutters and double windows to keep out the dust, and the inner window panes are of smoked glass to lessen the glare. With the shutters up it is almost dark and when both windows are down the interior has the appearance of twilight. When clear glass alone is used the rays are blinding and the sun comes through with such strength that it is not safe to have it strike the back of one’s neck. In addition to the double windows and shutters there are wooden hoods over the car windows, so that the direct rays of the sun may not shine in. The cars have also double roofs, and the doors have windows of smoked glass. There is so much dust that it comes in when everything is shut tight, and the porter has to sweep up every hour.

I found the conditions even worse in the Nubian Desert, which I crossed on the railroad from Wady Haifa, where I left the steamer Ibis, to Berber. That region is about the dreariest and most desolate on earth. It is all sand and rocks, with here and there a low barren mountain. The Nubians themselves call it “the stone belly,” and the name is well chosen.

The road through Nubia is a part of the Sudan military railway that extends from Wady Halfa to Khartum. It is one of the iron gateways to the Sudan, the other being the railway which the British have built from Atbara to Port Sudan and Suakim on the Red Sea. The military line is almost as long as from New York to Detroit and the Port Sudan line from the Red Sea to Atbara, where it connects with the military line, is less than half that length.

The Port Sudan road vies with the military railways in being one of the dirtiest railroads ever constructed. Its whole route is across the Nubian Desert. There is no vegetation at all between Atbara and the Red Sea until within about nine miles of the coast, and then only a scanty growth of thorn bush and scrub that feeds small flocks of camels and sheep.

This Red Sea road was opened about 1905. Since then it has been carrying a large part of the trade of the Sudan. Mohammedan pilgrims from Central Africa and the Lower Nile valley use it on their way to and from Mecca, and occasionally tourists come to Khartum via the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and this railroad.

The military line from Wady Halfa is the one built by General Kitchener during the war with the Mahdi. Constructed in less than eighteen months by the British engineers and soldiers, it is one of the most remarkable examples of railroad building on record. A large part of it was laid in the hottest time of the year and at the rate of one and a quarter miles per day, and once, more than three miles were laid in one day. Yet the work was so well done that heavy trains could travel safely over it even when making twenty-five miles an hour. It was built through a waterless desert which had never been mapped until the railroad surveyors went over it. During its construction the survey camp was kept about six miles in advance of the rail head. The road was built through a hostile country where there was constant danger of attack by the Dervishes.

To-day the cars move as smoothly over those tracks as they do over those of Egypt, and give that country regular connection with the Sudan. There is now a train de luxe connecting Khartum with Wady Halfa equipped with sleeping and dining cars.

The sleepers are divided into compartments about seven feet square with two berths to each. There is an aisle along the side of the car from which the compartments are entered, and each of the latter is large enough to enable one to have a wicker chair in it in addition to the berths. Every little room has an electric fan and is lighted by electricity.

The dining-car service is good and comparatively cheap. The meals consist of a cup of tea and some crackers brought in by a Nubian porter at daybreak; a breakfast in the dining car at eight o’clock; a table d’hôte luncheon at one, and a dinner in the evening.

In riding over the Sudan military road we stopped for a time at Atbara, where the Black Nile from Abyssinia flows into the main stream. Here is the famous bridge built by Americans upon orders given by General Kitchener. The contract was first offered to the English, but they were not able to build the bridge in the time required, so the Americans took the job and finished it. Atbara is now an important division point where the road across the desert to the Red Sea branches off. As we stopped at the station our engine struck me as looking familiar. I walked to the front of the train and examined it. Sure enough, it was a Baldwin, with the name “Philadelphia” standing out in the full blaze of the Nubian sun. Later on, when I crossed the Black Nile over the steel bridge put up by our builders, I felt that I was not out of touch with home, after all. I was being hauled by an American engine over an American bridge, though I was in the heart of the Nubian Desert more than a thousand miles up the Nile. The thought makes one proud of our American enterprise and mechanical genius.

At Atbara I learned a great deal about the road, which starts here on its three hundred and thirty mile journey through the Nubian Desert to the Red Sea. This little town might be called one of the railway centres of the Sudan. Lying at the junction of the two chief railways, it has the principal railroad offices and shops and is the home of the director, with whom I had a long talk about his line to the Red Sea. He had a part in building the road and is now its manager. We first visited the shops, which cover two or three acres of sandy waste. They are great sheds with walls of galvanized iron and roofs of iron and plate glass. I saw many locomotives, cars and steel ties, and telegraph poles outside. Going in, I found all sorts of railway repair and construction work under way. The machinists were a mixture of whites, blacks, and yellows, representing a half-dozen different nations and tribes. There were British overseers, Greek and Italian mechanics, some Nubian blacksmiths, and many Nubian boys taking a sort of manual-training course in order that they may serve as locomotive engineers, under machinists and trackmen. The machinery is of modern make and the shops are well equipped.

As we walked among the lathes and planing machines the director pointed out to me some of the peculiarities of the wear and tear of the desert upon railway materials.

“Here,” said he, as he pointed to the wheel of an American locomotive, in which was cut a groove so deep and wide that I could lay my three fingers in it, “is an example of how the sands ruin our car wheels. The flint-like grains from the desert blow over the rails, and as the cars move they grind out the steel as though they were emery powder. Consequently, the life of a wheel is short, and we have to cut down its tire every few months. Moreover, the sand gets into the bearings, and there is a continual wearing which necessitates almost constant repair.”

“How about your sandstorms? Are they serious obstacles to traffic?”

“At times, yes. They come with such violence that they cover the tracks; they cloud the sun so that when you are in one you cannot see your hand before your face. They often spring up afar off, so that you can watch them coming. At such times the sand gets into everything and cuts its way through all parts of the machinery.

“Another thing we have to contend with,” continued the railway manager, “is the extraordinary dryness of the air, which shrinks our rolling stock so that it has to be tightened up again and again. One of our passenger cars will shrink as much as eighteen inches in one wall alone, and we have to put in extra boards to fill up the gaps. The same is true of all sorts of woodwork.

“Another trouble is the white ant. That little termite eats anything wooden. It chews up the insides of our cars and even attacks the furniture. Where there is the least moisture the ants will go for the railroad ties, and they will chew out the insides of the wooden telegraph poles. They always work under cover, leaving a thin shell of wood outside. The result is that a tie or pole may look sound then all at once it will crumble to pieces. We have to inspect the road very carefully at regular intervals and watch out for weak points. We now use hollow steel tubes as ties. They do not make so smooth a road as the wooden ties, but the ants cannot eat them. We also have steel telegraph poles.”

“I noticed my train was pulled by an American locomotive. How do they compare with those from Great Britain?” I inquired.

“Not well,” replied the railroad director. “We have some of your engines which we bought seven years ago. We are still using them, but most of them have been repaired and made over. You people make locomotives, expecting to run them to their full capacity for four or five years and then throw them on the scrap heap. This is not advisable out here in the desert, where freight costs so much and the trouble of getting our rolling stock is so great. We want machinery that will stand all sorts of trials, including the climate. We want it rustproof and rotproof and heavily made all around. We have here not only the dry air and the sand to contend with, but also in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea the salt air and the alkali water.”

“I suppose the lack of water is one of your chief difficulties, is it not?” I asked.

“Yes. This railroad is over three hundred miles long and the track is laid through the sand. For about one third of the distance inland from the Red Sea the country is mountainous, but the rest of it is flat. There are no streams, so we have to rely on artesian wells for our water supply. We have bored a number, but we find that the water in many places is salt. We struck one well which had three per cent. of salt in it, and another in which the water was one per cent. salt. Of course such water is useless for our locomotives.

“We are having trouble also in getting a good water supply at Port Sudan. We sunk one well to a depth of eight hundred feet and struck a good flow of fresh water. We had hardly completed, it, however, before the salt water began to seep in, and we are now drilling again. There are some stretches along the route where there is no water whatever. In such places we have to carry our supply with us. For this we have tanks of galvanized iron, each of which will hold about fifteen hundred gallons.”

From Atbara I took a later train to continue my journey on toward Khartum. About one hundred miles south of Atbara we stopped at Shendi, where the Queen of Sheba is said to have lived. This is a station on the east bank of the Nile five hours or more from Khartum. It is a considerable town with railroad shops. I saw great piles of steel ties such as Captain Midwinter mentioned.

Shendi consists of an old and a new town. The latter has been laid out by the British and has a park in the centre watered by the Nile. In ancient times there was a great city here, for it was the capital of the country and the supposed residence of the Queen of Sheba, who went from here down the Nile and crossed to Palestine. There she had her famous flirtation with King Solomon. The Abyssinians say that she went back by the Red Sea and stopped in their country; and that while there she bore a son whose father was Solomon and who became the head of the line of kings which rule Abyssinia to-day. The Mohammedans, on the other hand, say that the Queen of Sheba did not live here at all. They claim that her residence was in Yemen, Arabia, and that Solomon went there to visit her. The queen’s name was Balkis. As witty as she was beautiful, she gave the wise Solomon many a riddle which he was puzzled to answer.