Major Burnham has chosen men from England, Ireland,
the United States, and South Africa for sterling qualities, and they
have justified his choice. Not the least like a hero is the retiring,
diffident little major himself, though a finer man for a friend or a
better man to serve under would not be found in the five
continents."
Burnham explored a tract of land larger than Germany, penetrating
a thousand miles through a country, never before visited by white
men, to the borders of the Congo Basin. With him he had twenty
white men and five hundred natives. The most interesting result of
the expedition was the discovery of a lake forty-nine miles square,
composed almost entirely of pure carbonate of soda, forming a
snowlike crust so thick that on it the men could cross the lake.
It is the largest, and when the railroad is built--the Uganda
Railroad is now only eighty-eight miles distant--it will be the most
valuable deposit of carbonate of soda ever found.
A year ago, in the interests of John Hays Hammond, the
distinguished mining engineer of South Africa and this country,
Burnham went to Sonora, Mexico, to find a buried city and to open
up mines of copper and silver.
Besides seeking for mines, Hammond and Burnham, with Gardner
Williams, another American who also made his fortune in South
Africa, are working together on a scheme to import to this country
at their own expense many species of South African deer.
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