VICTORIA FALLS. » 329 



to use the same liberty as the JMakololo did, and gave the 

 only English name I have affixed to any part of the 

 country. No better proof of previous ignorance of this 

 river could be desired than that an untravelled gentleman, 

 who had spent a great part of his life in the study of the 

 geography of Africa and knew every thing written on the 

 subject from the time of Ptolemy downward, actually 

 asserted in the "Athenaeum," while I was coming up the 

 .Red Sea, that this magnificent river, the Leeambye, " had 

 no connection with the Zambesi, but flowed under the 

 Kalahari Desert and became lost j" and " that, as all the 

 old maps asserted, the Zambesi took its rise in the very 

 hills to which we have now come." This modest assertion 

 smacks exactly as if a native of Timbuctoo should declare 

 that the " Thames" and the "Pool" were different rivers, 

 he having seen neither the one nor the other. Leeambye 

 and Zambesi mean the very same thing, — viz., the River. 



Sekeletu intended to accompany me; but, one canoe 

 only having come instead of the two he had ordered, he 

 resigned it to me. After twenty minutes' sail from Kalai 

 we came in sight, for the first time, of the columns of vapor 

 appropriately called " smoke," rising at a distance of five 

 or six miles, exactly as when large tracts of grass are 

 burned in Africa. Five columns now arose, and, bending 

 in the direction of the wind, they seemed placed against a 

 low ridge covered with trees ; the tops of the columns at 

 this distance appeared to mingle with the clouds. They 

 were white below, and higher up became dark, so as to 

 simulate smoke very closely. The whole scene was ex- 

 tremely beautiful. The banks and islands dotted over the 

 river are adorned with sylvan vegetation of great variety 

 of color and form. At the period of our visit several trees 

 were spangled over with blossoms. Trees have each their 

 own physiognomy. There, towering over all, stands the 

 great burly baobab, each of whose enormous arms would 

 form the trunk of a large tree, besides groups of graceful 

 palms, which, with their feathery-shaped leaves depicted 



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