ITALY: Two Roads

When the Fascist ax & rods drove the Lion of Judah from his Ethiopian home, Benito Mussolini was faced with grueling transport problems. Only means of carrying food, garrison troops and colonists from the Red Sea coast to Ethiopia's capital was by the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railroad, 494 mi. of rough, single-track, narrow-gauge roadbed over which crawled rattling, second-hand rolling stock to a terminus in French territory.

With the thoroughness that has marked all Italian road-building enterprises since the days of Gaius Julius Caesar, Mussolini massed 100,000 Italian workmen, organized them as units of the Fascist Militia to give them dignity in the eyes of Ethiopia's Semitic blackamoors, set them to work digging.

The most important highway planned was to stretch for 800 mi. from Asmara— linked to the Red Sea by a short Italian railroad—through Dessie to Addis Ababa. It was to be wide enough for four lines of traffic, durable enough to withstand big rains, which every summer since the days of Pharaoh have made Ethiopia a 100% impassable sea of mud. A second road 50 mi. long was to link Debarech in the country's deep interior and Gondar, an important town 25 mi. north of vital Lake Tana, which empties its waters into the Blue Nile, feeds British irrigation works in the Sudan.

By last week both roads were finished. Proudly Il Duce ordained for the bigger one the honor of an official opening.