256 MATABELE LAND. 



tween hills some three or four hundred feet in height, 

 presents to the eye a smooth open surface, dotted 

 over by a number of picturesque, tree-covered islands. 

 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 within these narrow limits immediately after 

 flowing over 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, 1 is about 1170 

 yards from the western and 600 from the eastern end 

 of the abyss, the river at the Falls flowing nearly due 



1 'Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi,' p. 254. 



