Construction Site

A great battle of human labor—back in an age without large-scale machinery, every project required manpower. For Africans who had only just stepped out of primitive society, this was plainly beyond the syllabus.

On the western side of the Mitumba Mountains, in order to clear a path forward for the Hesse Railway, the Hesse Provincial Government prepared to mobilize four hundred thousand people to prepare the planned route.

Naturally, four hundred thousand people could not be gathered all at once. Aside from applying for personnel from elsewhere, the more important task was mobilizing the people of Hesse Province, with even more militia deployed to ensure the project proceeded in an orderly fashion.

Besides suppressing Black people, there were all manner of dangers in the primeval forest, and these too had to be dealt with by locals. After all, they had lived here for so many years and accumulated considerable experience.

Logging alone was quite a massive undertaking. It was not as simple as merely bringing down the trees; the roots beneath the ground also had to be cleared away completely.

The primeval forests of Hesse Province were exceptionally dangerous. In forests untouched for thousands upon thousands of years, trees frequently stood more than ten meters tall, and those thirty or forty meters high were hardly rare. If their direction was not properly controlled, one might randomly crush some lucky fellow to death. Even in the twenty-first century, logging was dangerous work, so this was unavoidable.

A Black lumberjack, a rope tied around his waist, nimbly climbed to the top of a tree. He reached behind his back, pulled out the rope, expertly tied it around the trunk, and then slid back down.

Soon after, two lumberjacks below hacked fiercely at the trunk with iron axes produced in East Africa. Finally,