THE UGANDA RAILWAY only a year or so before. There were about twenty bridge builders and foremen from different parts of the United States, and a Pennsylvania man named Jarrett who acted as superintendent of construction. Arriving at Mombasa in December, 1900, these men had completed their work before the following Christmas. They acted merely as superintendents and fancy workmen. All the rough labour was done by East Indians and native Africans, furnished by the British. When the road was started, the government planned to use only Africans, but finding this impossible, they imported twenty thousand coolies from India. The coolies came on contracts of from two to five years, at wages of from four to fifteen dollars a month and rations. The native labourers were paid about ten cents a day.

Before the workmen from the United States arrived here a large part of the bridge material was already in Mombasa. The Americans left one man there to see that additional materials were forwarded promptly, and came at once to the scene of action. They put up the bridges at the rate of something like one a week, and constructed the longest viaduct in sixty-nine and one half working hours.

What they did forms one of the wonders of civil and mechanical engineering. The bridge material was so made that its pieces fitted together like clockwork, not¬ withstanding the fact that it was put into shape away off here, thousands of miles from the place of construction and in one of the most uncivilized parts of the world. The materials in the viaducts included about half a million feet of southern pine lumber and over thirteen million pounds of steel. The steel was in more than one hundred 249