e verdant walls will soon
be gashed by shovels and discoloured with ore oxide. Over all the area
the Anglo-Saxon has laid his galvanizing hand. One reason is that there
are few Belgian engineers of large mining experience. Another is that
the American, by common consent, is the one executive who gets things
done in the primitive places.

I cannot leave the Congo copper empire without referring to another
Robert Williams achievement which is not without international
significance. Like other practical men of affairs with colonial
experience, he realized long before the outbreak of the Great War
something of the extent and menace of the German ambition in Africa. As
I have previously related, the Kaiser blocked his scheme to run the
Cape-to-Cairo Railway between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Kivu, after King
Leopold had granted him the concession. Williams wanted to help Rhodes
and he wanted to help himself. His chief problem was to get the copper
from the Katanga to Europe in the shortest possible time. Most of it is
refined in England and Belgium. At present it goes out by way of
Bulawayo and is shipped from the port of Beira in Portuguese East
Africa. This involves a journey of 9,514 miles from Kambove to London.
How was this haul to be shortened through an agency that would be proof
against the German intrigue and ingenuity?

[Illustration: ON THE LUALABA]

[Illustration: A VIEW ON THE KASAI]

Williams cast his eye over Africa. On the West Coast he spotted Lobito
Bay, a land-locked harbour twenty miles north of Benguella, one of the
principal parts of Angola, a Portuguese colony. From it he ran a line
straight from Kambove across the wilderness and found that it covered a
distance of approximately 1,300 miles. He said to himself, "This is the
natural outlet of the Katanga and the short-cut to England and Belgium."
He got a concession from the Portuguese Government and work began. The
Germans tried in every way to block the project for it interfered with
their scheme to "benevolently" assimilate Angola.

At the time of my visit to the Congo three hundred and twenty miles of
the Benguella Railway, as it is called, had been constructed and a
section of one hundred miles or more was about to be started. The line
will pass through Ruwe, which is an important center of gold production
in the Katanga, and connect up with the Katanga Railway just north of
Kambove. It is really a link in the Cape-to-Cairo system and when
comp