BUT it is still more easy, as one traverses in forty-eight hours countries which ten years ago would have baffled the toilsome marches of many weeks,* to underrate the difficulties in which unavoidable ignorance and astonishing conditions plunged the pioneers.
The British art of “muddling through” is here seen in one of its finest expositions. Through everything — through the forests, through the ravines, through troops of marauding lions, through famine, through war, through five years of excoriating Parliamentary debate, muddled and marched the railway; and here at last, in some more or less effective fashion, is it arrived at its goal. Other nations project Central African railways as lightly and as easily as they lay down naval programmes; but here is a railway, like the British Fleet, “in being” — not a paper plan or an airy dream, but an iron fact grinding along through the jungle and the plain, waking with its whistles the silences of the Nyanza,* and startling the tribes out of their primordial nakedness with “Americani” piece goods made in Lancashire.*
* Prior to the coming of the British and their railway, the long and perilous journey from the east coast to the Lake Victoria region inland was made by camel caravans using slave labour. One of the beneficent effects of the railway was to put these caravans and the slavers who profited from them out of business.
* The Bantu word for ‘lake’, in this case Lake Victoria. In English pronunciation the first syllable (ny) may rhyme with knee or with nigh.
* Piece goods are items such as curtains, bed sheets, carpets or handkerchiefs, produced and sold in standard dimensions. Americani was an unbleached cotton sheeting originally exported to East Africa from America. The railway allowed textile firms from England’s northwest to move into the market.