THE VICTORIA FALLS. 201 



The depth of the narrow chasm, which draws off" such a vast volume of 

 water must be very great. At one place it has been plumbed to a depth 

 more than twice that of the pool into which the St. Lawrence falls at Niagara. 

 The great smoke clouds are formed by five distinct columns of spray which 

 ascend from the gulf to a height of from two to three hundred feet. Three 

 of these columns — two on the right, and one on the left of Garden Island, 

 which overlook the falls, appeared to Livingstone to contain as much water 

 in each, as there is in the Clyde at the fall of Stonebyres during a flood. The 

 waters are drained off near the eastern end of the falls by a prolongation of 

 the rocky chasm, which pursues its way, with little variation as to breadth, 

 in a zigzag course through the mass of low hills for over thirty miles, when 

 the tormented waters break into the plain and spread out to their former 

 width, to be here and there narrowed by the several rapids which interrupt 

 its navigation, in some cases even to the light canoes of the bold and skilful 

 Makalaka and Batoka men. 



The scene round the falls is exceedingly beautiful. The banks and islands 

 are covered with vegetation, through which the giants of the African forest 

 rear their lofty crests. The baobab, each of whose arms would form great 

 trees, the palmyra, with its feathery leaves, the mohonou, in form like the 

 cedars of Lebanon, the cypress-like motsouri, and other varieties of trees 

 similar to our own oaks, elms, and chestnuts, stand out clear against the back- 

 ground of smoke cloud, which during the day glows in the sun, and is 

 surmounted by magnificent rainbows, and at night shines with a yellow sul- 

 phurous haze, shadowed by clouds of pitchy blackness, as if belched from the 

 crater of a burning mountain. No wonder the ignorant natives look upon 

 this scene, so grand and so terrible in its beauty and majesty, as the abode of 

 their God Barimo ; it is the highest manifestation of the power and gran- 

 deur of nature with which they are acquainted. The untutored savage 

 worships power and mystery ; and here these are presented to him in a form 

 which cannot fail to impress his imagination. 



Previous to the formation of the immense fissure into which the Zambesi 

 falls, the plains above must have been the bed of a vast lake, and its whole 

 course from the falls upwards, previous to Livingstone's visit, had been popu- 

 larly supposed to be a parched desert. The great traveller notices that while 

 he was engaged in resolving this a writer in the Athenceum, dealing with the 

 previous discoveries and guesses as to the extent of this river, placed its source 

 in the neighbourhood of the falls, on the edge of a great desert, and made its 

 upper waters, the Leeba and the Leeambye, turn sharply to the south, and 

 lose themselves in the arid wastes of the Kalahari desert ; so difficult is it to 

 get mere theorists to give up a long-existing notion. To this writer a central 

 desert must exist, and all other physical facts, however new and strange, must 

 conform to it. 



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