Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/255

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

. . . I can remember very distinctly when Stanley "discovered" Dr. Livingstone in the country I shall visit shortly in comfortable railway trains, and the railway has now been built four hundred miles beyond Victoria Falls. Stanley's first expedition into Africa was a newspaper sensation, financed by the New York Herald, as Dr. Livingstone was not lost, and, when Stanley "found" him, was engaged quietly in making maps of the interior.



Saturday, March 8.—We spent this day traveling from Durban to Johannesburg. The distance is four hundred and eighty-three miles, and we were twenty-four hours and a half on the way, as we left Durban at 5:50 last night, and arrived here at 6:20 this evening. The distance from New York to Chicago is about a thousand miles, and the best trains on the Pennsylvania and New York Central make it in twenty hours. Formerly they made it in eighteen hours, but the speed was so great that travelers complained. The train on which we traveled today was the Limited, and as good as there is in South Africa. The track is narrow-gauge, and, as seems the rule on all railroads operated by the government, the train was crowded, though we had no cause to complain; we were given a compartment to ourselves, without extra charge. When we arrived at the station last night, we found a placard on the window of a compartment, announcing that it was reserved for "Mr. and Miss Howe." The compartment would have easily seated four. It was provided with