198 THE " SMOKE-RESOUNDING " FALLS. 



but from this point they adopt a northerly course, to empty their 

 tribute into the Kasaii or Loke. 



The interior table-land, especially towards the mid-course of the 

 Zambesi, is intersected by lofty mountain-chains. It is in this region, 

 and at the southernmost point of the river's great Delta, which is 

 270 miles in length, that the famous Falls occur, named by the 

 natives " Mosioatounya," or "Smoke-resounding," re-christened by 

 Livingstone, the Victoria. Their vast columns of vapour are visible 

 at a distance of five or six miles, and might suggest to an American 

 traveller the rolling clouds that ascend from a burning prairie. The 

 banks and islands of the river are here enriched with sylvan vegeta- 

 tion of every variety of form and colour: the mighty baobab, each of 

 whose enormous arms would form the trunk of a large tree; the grace- 

 ful palm, with its crest of plume-like foliage; the silvery mohonams, 

 whose leaves sparkle in the sunshine like Achilles' shield; and the 

 nutsouri, abounding in clusters of pleasant scarlet fruit. 



The Falls are bounded on three sides by densely-wooded ridges 

 300 or 400 feet in height, and may be likened to a flood of water 

 a thousand yards broad, suddenly hurled over a basaltic precipice 

 100 feet in depth, and then as suddenly compressed into a narrow 

 gully not more than fifteen or twenty yards across. 



"If one imagines," says Dr. Livingstone,* "the Thames filled with 

 low tree-covered hills immediately below the Tunnel, extending as 

 far as Gravesend, the bed of black basaltic rock instead of London 

 mud, and a fissure made therein from one end of the Tunnel to the 

 other, down through the keystones of the arch, and prolonged from 

 the left end of the Tunnel through thirty miles of hills; then fancy 

 the Thames leaping bodily into the gulf, and forced there to change 

 its direction and flow from the right to the left bank, and then rush 

 boiling and roaring through the hills, he may have some idea of what 

 takes place at this the most wonderful sight I have witnessed in 

 Africa." 



In descending into the narrow abyss already spoken of, the 

 * Livingstone, " Missionary Travels and Researches." 



