DESCRIPTION OF THE TALIS. 255 
Where the Falls occur the river is upwards of a mile 
in width, and the Falls extend the whole of this dis- 
tance, their line broken at intervals by dark project- 
ing buttresses of rock, forming, some of them, small 
islands with trees upon their tops ; whilst others, of 
much less size, present merely a bare and jagged 
surface. The Falls are occasioned by what appears 
to have been a rift in the original bed of the river — 
a rending asunder of the rock in the river-bed, over 
the edge of which the whole waters of the Zambesi 
are poured down into a deep, narrow gorge below, 
its width varying from something like eighty to a 
hundred yards. The water escapes from this deep 
abyss, where it boils and foams tumultuously after its 
descent, by a still narrower channel of from twenty to 
thirty yards in width, and apparently about the same 
depth as the fissure into which the water falls, 
the waters of the river being thus suddenly com- 
pressed into this narrow limit immediately after flow- 
ing through a bed upwards of a mile in breadth just 
above the Falls. The river after this proceeds by a 
zigzag course from east to west for about five miles, 
through a continuation of this narrow cutting, before 
it finally flows away in a more direct line eastwards. 
This outlet, Livingstone informs us,^ is about 1 1 70 
yards from the western and 600 from the eastern end 
of the abyss, the river at the Falls flowing nearly due 
north and south, whilst the fissure which receives the 
water lies nearly east and west. At this point the 
rushing waters from either side unite after they have 
^ Narrative of an Expcdllioii to the Zambesi, p. 254. 
