MEDITERRANEAN TO SUDAN built by Americans upon orders given by General Kitch¬ ener. 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 “ Philadel¬ phia” 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, *55