"Go in high, not low," Costello Garang Ring, a Sudanese prince, calls out to the pilot, who gives him a thumbs-up and nods. The Cessna ten-seater banks steeply toward a runway in the bush. In theory, the shooting in this region ended three years ago, when Sudanese rebels captured the city of Kapoeta in southeastern Sudan. But Garang Ring still doesn't feel completely safe.

The plane comes to a bumpy stop in front of a crowd of people waiting at the end of the runway. Garang Ring gets out, followed by his friend, Klaus Thormählen, a man from Bad Oldesloe in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein. They're greeted by the afternoon heat, the sound of drumbeats, and a choir of naked children directed by a woman in a green dress. Instead of flowers, a girl hands Thormählen an aluminum can with the label "Del Monte Fruit Cocktail" still attached to it. The can contains grasses and a few thorny red berries. The child smiles shyly.

Then the crowd moves along the main street, through a landscape deeply scarred by civil war. Bullet-riddled military trucks and tanks litter the dirt road, and the wreckage of buildings perforated by machine gun fire dot the horizon. In between, there is grass, bushes, a few cows and the red earth of the African steppe.

In the country's 21-year civil war, the Arab government in the northern capital of Khartoum and the black rebel army, the SPLA, fought a tough battle for Kapoeta. Now the rebels are to be given their own autonomous state, Southern Sudan. That's why they're here: Prince Garang Ring, who spent many years studying at German universities, and Thormählen, a 53-year-old railroad magnate and multimillionaire. They plan to transform Kapoeta into the nucleus of a new country, and Thormählen has enlisted the help of major German corporations to achieve their goal. Within four years, a modern train could be making a stop here, in Kapoeta, a backward corner of the Third World, every morning at 8:30 a.m., at least if engineers from the faraway German town of Bad Oldesloe have their way.

Kapoeta, a ghost town in the middle of nowhere in southern Sudan, is the starting point for one of Africa's most ambitious construction projects: If all goes well, a cement factory here will supply the ties for more than 4,000 kilometers of railroad. The line could link Southern Sudan, the new country along the banks of the White Nile, with Uganda and the Kenyan city of Mombassa on the Indian Ocean.

The railroad would transport oil, ore and teak. But most of all, the railroad would do for Africa what the Union Pacific did for the United States and the Trans-Siberian Railroad did for Russia -- bind together vast stretches of land into a single country.

Continue to Part Two.

The railroad is the ambitious brainchild of Garang Ring and Thormählen. The future economics minister of Southern Sudan has already signed a preliminary construction agreement. Southern Sudan's future head of state, rebel leader John Garang (no relation to Prince Garang Ring), has declared the project a national priority. The railroad is intended to help develop Southern Sudan, link it to East Africa, and transport its raw materials to the world's oceans. Although it would cost €3 billion to build, Sudan has oil, lots of oil, and gold, which explains why something could actually come of this daring project.

The civil war in southern Sudan was one of Africa's longest and bloodiest. But now six partial treaties have already been signed, and negotiations surrounding the final peace treaty are currently underway in Kenya. Under this treaty, the black south and the Arab north would split the oil revenues from fields in the center of the country. The treaty also provides that the south will receive its own government and army and that, in six years, there will be a popular referendum on whether the south should truly become an independent country, the "new Sudan" that has always been a dream of the SPLA.

Until then, the state will be governed by the former rebel leaders, possibly to be followed by elections down the road. For now, John Garang will remain in charge of the region.

And that's why a German delegation, led by Klaus Thormählen, is currently traveling through East Africa. The businessmen in the delegation plan to return to Germany in early November. The delegation includes a senior manager from ThyssenKrupp, a financial expert, and the deputy managing director of privately owned Radio Hamburg -- his job would be to get the national radio station up and running. Another member of the team is Hamburg real estate mogul Dieter Becken, who would be involved in construction projects for the government. In Sudan, the group is meeting with executives from Siemens, which will develop power plants, the power grid and telephone lines, as well as an executive from Strabag, a German construction company that would be involved in road construction.

These are the basic elements for developing the infrastructure of an entire state -- made in Germany.

The project began with some broken pipes in a mansion near Bad Oldesloe. While doing the repairs, the plumber told house owner Klaus Thormählen about another of his customers: The man, he said, was Sudanese, some sort of politician, from a well-known family. He said that the Sudanese man lived nearby and was interested in railroads. Klaus Thormählen invited the man to his estate, which has its own indoor riding ring and lake.

The man from faraway Sudan, tall and well-dressed, introduced himself as Costello Garang Ring, first-born son of the King of the Dinka, the most powerful tribe in southern Sudan.

On the Sunday of his visit to Thormählen's estate, the prince spoke of the two million lives the civil war in his country had claimed. He talked about the possibility of peace, about oil fields that would provide revenue for southern Sudan, and about a railroad the south would build with this revenue. He also told his host that he himself would soon become an influential man in Sudan. Until then, Klaus Thormählen hadn't been especially interested in Africa.

That was three years ago.

From that Sunday on, Thormählen paid close attention to any news about the country. He read newspaper editorials suggesting that the civil war could soon come to an end. In August of last year, Costello Garang Ring, residing in northern Germany, was appointed shadow minister of international cooperation and development ("a sort of foreign minister"). "Everything Costello told me has actually happened," says Klaus Thormählen.

At that point, Thormählen began to believe in the project, and that, once again, he had landed in the right place, at the right time. The first time was years ago, when he quit his job as a minor official with the German National Railroad to open a railroad construction company.

The Berlin Wall came down a few months later. Railroads were built and Thormählen made his fortune with a process he had developed for connecting rails on site called "mobile flash-butt welding." Today, he employs 400 people, and his companies build railroads in Germany, Spain, Sweden and Taiwan. Sales amounted to €100 million last year.

Perhaps it takes someone who has already taken such a huge step in his life to be capable of believing in a much larger endeavor. "Thormählen is not someone who sets limits for himself," says one of his business partners, Jens Flachsbarth. Although Thormählen himself says that he sometimes feels as though the whole thing has been "like a fairy tale from a Thousand-and-One Nights," he's already invested €1 million of his own in this fairy tale.

If the project materializes, Thormählen hopes to be making the deal of his life, and maybe even to become a little famous in the process. He calls the business trip to Africa the "delegation for peace in Sudan."

Continue to Part Three.

Costello Garang Ring, 50, is the link between the two worlds and Thormählen's door-openers. His father sent him to school in Germany more than twenty years ago, where he first studied veterinary medicine, and later political science. Garang Ring stayed in Germany, where he became the rebel movement's overseas spokesman. He too has a lot at stake. If the railroad becomes a reality, it would help advance Garang Ring's candidacy for high-level political office in the new country, such as that of its president.

"You will have train stations, you will have trains, and you will have mines," Garang Ring promises the people in Kapoeta. He wears a gray, double-breasted suit with brown pinstripes, a green linen shirt, tennis shoes and a tiger's eye ring. He speaks quietly, while another man shouts his message to the crowd -- a prince and minister does not raise his voice. The people cheer and stamp their feet.

Then the members of the delegation sit down in the dark house of the city administrator. Unfinished wooden beams support a corrugated metal roof with so many bullet holes that looking up at it is like looking at a star-filled sky. City administrator Adelio Kan Kakla has written a speech on frayed paper weighed down with a hand-carved stick. But then he decides to keep things brief, looks at Thormählen, and says: "Take what you wish from Kapoeta."

Thormählen, blond and wearing a beige wool sports jacket, grins and responds: "We believe that this limestone, this ore and, most of all, these people will help us bring opportunity to Kapoeta." Thormählen is a soft-spoken man. One could imagine him as a high-school guidance counselor. He talks about the infrastructure as the backbone of every economy, about the soldiers who will become railroad construction workers, and about their children, who could become engineers one day.

The next morning, the men fly back to Nairobi and their air-conditioned hotel.

Others stay longer. Rupert Neudeck, founder of the German aid organization Cap Anamur is one of them. Despite the civil war, he has traveled extensively in southern Sudan. He's spent weeks hiking to remote, otherwise inaccessible locations. He's watched Antonov aircraft sent by the Arab central government drop bombs on his organization's bush clinics.

But does Sudan really need a railroad?

"It's the most essential thing of all," says Neudeck, searching for words to express his tremendous enthusiasm for the project. "The railroad would give this country such a boost; it's almost impossible to describe."

But he also warns that the south could face a "Yugoslav phase," and against the prospect of teenage soldiers being expected to restore civil order. He's also worried that Thormählen knows far too little about this wild country.

Volker Riehl, a tall, powerful man with a ruddy complexion, works for Misereor, the German Catholic Bishop's organization for development cooperation, and spent many years running projects for the German Leper Relief Organization in Sudan. He has returned to the country again and again. He hopes for a permanent peace, and he believes it could work.

But Riehl also talks about a "stone-age society," about warlords, the slave trade and many other reasons why Sudan is more like hell than any other place on earth. A railroad, he says, isn't exactly the first thing you need in a place like that.

The city administrator in Kapoeta could have given Thormählen, the financial experts, and the people from Krupp a few more details: that there is no power (of course not), and that the area's manually-operated wells don't always yield water. That there is no hospital and no doctor. That the people are dying of diarrhea and malaria, and probably of AIDS, but that no one knows exactly what's killing them. But he also talks about a sense of hope greater than it's been for decades. "My grandfather was born in war, my father was born in war, and was born in war. My grandfather died in war and my father died in war. I am now 45. I want to make it to 90 and even past that."

Thormählen also could have talked to Kapoeta's poker-faced police officer, Logale Lino, who sits on a plastic chair under an acacia tree. This is his office. He likes his job, even though no one pays him a salary. He has decorative scars on his forehead, as well as scars from two bullets that once grazed his head.

The war is over, but peace is still a long way off, he says: Bands of cattle thieves are constantly attacking other clans, steeling cattle, shooting people and raping women. Should he go after the perpetrators, without a car, of course, on foot in his blue rubber sandals with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder?

What would the railroads mean for him? A broad grin settles over Logale Lino's face. "Ding, ding, ding" he says, imitating the sound of a train. But at least he knows what a train is -- many here don't. "I could go to Juba to see my family," he says. He hasn't seem them since the war began 21 years ago.

Continue to Part Four.

But what will the gangs do to the trains when they arrive?

That's not a concern of the businessmen from Germany, because they're already sitting in their plane again. But even here, on their flight back to Nairobi, they can learn a lot about Sudan. That's because Manasa Machar Bol, 26, a major in the SPLA and Garang Ring's office manager in Nairobi, is also on board. He wears tight jeans, cowboy boots and sunglasses. He is a laid-back man who has experienced more than most people.

At the age of eight, he was recruited by the rebel army in the chaos of the war. He shot people before he was even big enough to carry his own gun for longer distances. For many years, Machar Bol had no idea what he was fighting for. The war began in 1983, when the Arab north imposed Sharia, or Islamic law, on the entire country, a move opposed by the Christian blacks in the south. But the war's true roots lay in the decades-long suppression of the blacks by the Arabs, who were supported by the colonial powers. The north captured slaves in the south and also took its oil. The money went to Khartoum.

Machar Bol learned about this history in the rebel camps. Today, when he's asked how many people he has killed, he says: "I regret that they are dead, but there was a reason."

There is also a reason for peace. In the 1990s, Costello Garang Ring traveled back and forth between Germany and Washington several times, warning the Americans about Osama bin Laden, who hid in the north for some time, and about other Islamic extremists. He was only taken seriously after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. George W. Bush sent a special envoy, who pressed the north to enter into peace negotiations.

But without peace in southern Sudan, the war in Sudan's other troubled region, Darfur, would probably not have come about. At least not to its full extent, because the fighting there only became truly fierce after the Darfur rebels saw what their counterparts in the south had accomplished.