Difficulties of an Argentine railway engineer--Why Argentina has the
Irish gauge--A sudden contrast--A more violent contrast--Names and
their obligations--Capetown--The thoroughness of the Dutch pioneers--A
dry and thirsty land--The beautiful Dutch Colonial houses--The
Huguenot refugees--The Rhodes Fruit Farms--Surf-riding--Groote
Schuur--General Botha--The Rhodes Memorial--The episode of the Sick
Boy--A visit from Father Neptune--What pluck will do.


A railway engineer in the Argentine Republic is confronted with
peculiar difficulties. In the first place, in a treeless country there
is obviously no wood for sleepers. A thousand miles up the giant
Parana there are vast tracts of forest, but either the wood is
unsuited for railway-sleepers, or the means of transport are lacking,
so the engineer is forced to use iron pot-sleepers for supporting his
rails. These again require abundant ballast, and there is no ballast
in a country devoid of stone and with a soil innocent of the smallest
pebble. The engineer can only use burnt clay to ballast his road, and
as a result the dust on an Argentine railway defies description. In my
time, when carriages of the English type were in use, the atmosphere
after an hour's run was as thick as a dense London November fog, and
after five or six hours' travelling the passengers alighted with faces
as black as niggers'. Whilst waiting for a train, its approach would
be announced by a vast pillar of dust appearing in the distance. This
pillar of dust seemed almost to reach the sky, and any passengers of
Hebraic origin must really have imagined themselves back in the Sinai
peninsula, and must have wondered why the dusky pillar was approaching
them instead of leading them on.

The difficulties connected with the working of railways did not end