The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-05-19

1 The average level of the Sahara
 throughout Is as high as that of the Blue ! Ridge mountains in Virginia. There are
 but few places where 1t drops to 800 feet
 above the sea, and only one or two in
 which it falls below sea level. Lake Chad ] itself is several hundred feet above the 1 ocean.
 1 In the lower part of the central Sahara, on the upper edge of which l am now writing, there is plateau extending from northwest to southeast, which Is on the average more than 2G00 feet high, and upon it there is a mountain range which rises in places to almost 10000 feet. The
 mountains are so high that they are
 crowned with snow in the winter.
 In the western Sahara the country Is
 almost equally rough, and there is much
 rolling land in the Desert of Libya. at
 the east
 Poor Place for Railway.
 In addition to it's rolling character, the
 desert offers many obstacles to railroad
 building. One is the long stretches over
 which the track must go without water,
 and another is the enormous cost of haul
 ing the fuel At Colomb Bechar the
 terminus of the road which the French
 are building southward toward Timbuktu,
 coal is now worth S20 a ton; and, unless
 mines can be found along the line of
 the route. a cheaper fuel must be ob-
 tained or the extension abandoned. The
 stations at present are chiefly at the oases. but even there the pipes which
 supply the water tanks are wrapped with
 straw to retard evaporation and every
 means Is used to increase the water sup ply.
 little support for a railroad. It is peppered with oases, but the fertile spots are far apart, and it is only in such regions as the Fezzan. Twat
 and Tahlet, where there are large numbers of oases together, that there will be many passengers or much | freight The Sahara has, all told, about s0,000 square miles of oases, /, but these are scattered over re- ! zion larger than Europe and many of them are inaccessible except to i camels.
 The freight of the desert is chiefly | made up of dates, grain and alfa 1 grass Some tobacco and cotton are l raised in the southern Sahara, but
 not enough to form a freight item; [ and the salt mines, fhich now supply | part of the caravan loads, would 1 not make a great traffic.
 The soudan.
 1 The Soudan, at the south of the Sa- | hara, is far different It has an enor- l nous population of native blacks No | one knows how many there are, but ! the probability is that they number i between fifty and one hundred million ] souls There are something like twen- 1 ty-hve millions in Nigeria alone, and | the French and German provinces con- l tain many millions more. There are 1 big towns there, such as Kuka and 1 Kano which are now caravan centers, l and others, such as Timbuktu, which
 were cities once, and which would be i great again if a railroad could be | built to them.
 At present the caravan trade is fall | ing off. The trains of one thousand l or more camels, guarded by soldiers,
 which used. to start across the Sahara
 with perhaps a half million dollars worth of goods, consisting of ivory 1 gold dust and slaves, have dwindled 1 to trains containing one hundred
 camels less, and the caravan trade | diminishes every year. It still carries 1 some European merchandise across 1 from Tripoli, Tunisia and Algeria to | the Soudan, but most of the goods for | that section go to the ports of west | Africa by steamer and are taken by | railroad and rivers to the headwaters | of the Niger.
 Route to Tinbuktu. | Indeed one can now go from the Uni- | ted States by steam vessels to Senegal. | and thence by trains and steamer to | Timbuktu. That city is not far from the | Niger, and Is the terminus of the cara
 van routes from Tripoli, Morocco and | Algeria. It lies thousand miles almost | directly south of Colomb Bechar the l end of the Western Algeria road into the