Lunatic Express: The Building of an Impossible 600 mile railway across East Africa

Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism. Nairobi: Westlands Sundries, 1987.

Paperback, 629 pages, plates.

Owner's name on the half-title-page, text browned.

Good condition.

'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. 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? 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 simply an imperialist maneuver, aimed at enabling Britain to control the upper Nile and thus maintain her hold on Egypt and the Suez Canal? 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, in brief, a tale of high adventure at the high noon of imperialism.'