The Lunatic Express, an entertainment in Imperialism

London: MacDonald, 1972 Heavy book may incur extra shipping outside New Zealand. DW price clipped and sunfaded spine. map end papers 559pp + plates etc, very tidy internallly. 19th Century building of the railway from Lake Victoria to Mombasa -against a hostile environment. The six year building of a railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria and the powerful personalities involved in building such a line. One had to be mad to attempt it. "On December 11, 1895, a young Englishman named George Whitehouse arrived at the sultry east African post of Mombasa. His assignment was to perform an engineering miracle: the building of a railway from the coast to Lake Victoria in Uganda -- a 600-mile route that was largely unmapped and barely explored. Directly behind Mombasa lay a scorched, waterless desert, one that caravans wisely skirted but that the railway must cross. Beyond, a horizonless scrub country climbed toward a jagged volcanic region bisected by the Great Rift Valley -- half mile deep in some places. A 100 miles of sponge-like quagmire marked the railway's last lap. The entire right of way bristled with hostile tribes, teemed with lions, whined with tsetse flies and breathed malaria. What, asked many of Whitehouse's fellow countrymen, was the purpose of this "gigantic folly"? Why was the railway needed, and whom would it benefit? Was it an effort to shore up an insolvent private trading company with public funds? Was it to exploit the rumored wealth of little-known central African kingdoms? Was it to destroy the slave trade? To encourage commerce and settlement? Or was it simply an imperialist maneuver, aimed at enabling Britain to control the upper Nile and thus maintain her hold on Egypt and the Suez Canal? Charles Miller's "The Lunatic Express" is the saga of the turbulent international race for the mastery and development of an immense region that all but visionaries thought worthless. It is, on the one hand, the gripping narrative of the building of the railway itself -- the colossal 6 year enterprise that was to cost 5,000,000 Pounds and countless lives from derailments, collisions, disease, tribal raids and the assaults of wild animals. It is also a diorama of an earlier Africa of slave and ivory empires, of sultans and tribal monarchs and the vast lands they ruled. Above all, however, it is the story of the white intruders, the men whose combined avarice, honor and tenacious courage made them a breed apart: men like Joseph Thompson, the waggish young Scot who at 24 commanded an expedition across east Africa's least known and most dreaded region; Carl Peters, the German meta-physician who created for the Kaiser and empire twice the size of his own; Frederick Lugard, the diminutive British army officer who single-handedly brought Uganda under the Union Jack; Lt.-Col. J.H. Patterson -- of "The Man-Eaters of Tsavo" fame -- who spent nearly a year tracking the man-eating lions of Tsavo that were decimating his railway workers; John Boyes, the first white man to penetrate the heart of Kikuyuland and emerge alive; Lord Delamere, the short-tempered nobleman whose tireless pioneering efforts were largely responsible for the settlement of Kenya.". First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7? - 9? tall.