VICTORIA PALLS. 331 



leaped down a hundred feet and then became suddenly 

 compressed into a space of fifteen or twenty yards. The 

 entire falls are simply a crack made in a hard basaltic 

 rock from the right to the left bank of the Zambesi, and 

 then prolonged from the left bank away through thirty or 

 forty miles of hills. If one imagines the Thames filled 

 with low, tree-covered hills immediately beyond 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, the pathway being 

 one hundred feet down from the bed of the river instead 

 of what it is, with the lips of the fissure from eighty to 

 one hundred feet apart, then fancy the Thames leaping 

 boldly into the gulf, and forced there to change its direc- 

 tion 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 had witnessed in Africa. In looking down into the 

 fissure on the right of the island, one sees nothing but a 

 dense white cloud, which, at the time we visited the spot, 

 had two bright rainbows on it. (The sun was on the 

 meridian, and the declination about equal to the latitude 

 Of the place.) From this cloud rushed up a great jet of 

 vapor exactly like steam, and it mounted two hundred or 

 three hundred feet high; there, condensing, it changed its 

 hue to that of dark smoke, and came back in a constant 

 shower, which soon wetted us to the skin. This shower 

 falls chiefly on the opposite side of the fissure, and a few 

 yards back from the lip there stands a straight hedge of 

 evergreen trees, whose leaves are always wet. From their 

 roots a number of little rills run back into the gulf; but, 

 as they flow down the steep wall there, the column of 

 vapor, in its ascent, licks them up clean off the rock, and 

 away they mount again. They are constantly running 

 down, but never reach the bottom. 



