The Lunatic Express : An Entertainment in Imperialism by Miller, Charles - 1971

History Book Club , 1971. 559pp, 51 illustrations, chart, 2 end-paper maps. The story of the Kenya-Uganda railway, the railway that made Kenya, and a tale of high adventure at the high noon of imperialism. Fine in Fine dustjacket, unmarked. "On December 11, 1895, a young Englishman named George Whitehouse arrived at the sultry east African port of Mombasa. His assignment there: 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 a mile deep in some places. A hundred miles of spongelike 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 rumoured 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 manoeuvre, 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 six-year enterprise that was to cost £5,000,000 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, honour and tenacious courage made them a breed apart: men like Joseph Thomson, the waggish young Scot who at twenty-four commanded an expedition across east Africa's least known and most dreaded region; Carl Peters, the German metaphysician who created for the Kaiser an empire twice the size of his own; Frederick Lugard, the diminutive British army officer who single-handedly brought Uganda under the Union Jack; Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Patterson, who spent nearly a year on the spoor of 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. The Lunatic Express, in brief, is a tale of high adventure at the high noon of imperialism."B48. 1st. Edition Thus.