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Thence it is comparatively easy, as most travellers know, to push on through Khartum, Berber, Wady Halfa and Assuan to the Egyptian capital. The distance from Mahagi to Cairo is something like 2,700 miles while the total mileage from Capetown to Cairo, along the line that I have indicated, is 7,000 miles.
Mahagi is on the western side of Lake Albert and is destined to be the lake terminus of the projected Congo-Nile Railway which will be an extension of the Soudan Railways. Here you begin the journey that enlists both railways and steamers and which gives practically a straight ahead itinerary to Cairo.
It covers roughly, and the name is no misnomer I am told, 680 miles through the jungle and skirts the principal Congo gold fields. A road has been built and motor cars are available. The railway route from Stanleyville to Mahagi, which will link the Congo and the Nile, is surveyed and would have been finished by this time but for the outbreak of the Great War.
Here I left the highway to Egypt and went down the Congo and my actual contact with the famous line ended. I could have gone on, however, and reached Cairo, with luck, in less than eight weeks. From Stanleyville you go to Mahagi, which is on the border between the Congo and Uganda. This is the only overland gap in the whole route.
It will be a feeder to the Cape-to-Cairo road and constitute a sort of back door to Egypt. It will also provide a shorter outlet to Europe for the copper in the Katanga district of the Congo. When you see equatorial Africa and more especially that part which lies between the rail-head at Bukama and Mahagi, you understand why the all-rail route is not profitable at the moment.
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