DESCRIPTION 01 THE FALLS. 259 



by Chapman at the time of his visit. " We see the 

 scenery," he wrote in July 1862, "at a great dis- 

 advantage just now, as this is the time of the 

 'sere and yellow leaf.'" In January, when Frank 

 Oates was there, the vegetation of course was at 

 its best. The trees on the right in this picture, 

 though looking little larger than bushes when viewed 

 from this side, rise in reality — again to quote the 

 authority of Chapman — to a majestic height of from 

 eighty to ninety feet, and constitute a dense forest, 

 always moistened by the spray from the Falls. 



The late Eduard Mohr who, as already stated, 

 visited the Falls in the month of June, was deeply 

 impressed with the splendour of this forest scenery, 

 and thus wrote of it in his description : x — " On the 

 east," he says, "parallel with the Falls, and some 

 forty-five paces to the south of them, ran the glorious 

 forest, its outline broken here and there by the 

 surging veil of spray, which has already been de- 

 scribed by Livingstone, Baines, and Chapman, and 

 which, in luxuriance, beauty, and variety of vege- 

 table forms, equalled anything I had ever seen either 

 in India, Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula, or Java. 

 The ferns assumed the proportions of trees ; gigantic 

 creepers, with stems as thick as ships' cables, ran 

 from branch to branch, and high above all waved 

 the feathery crowns of the palms, whilst fine clumps of 

 bamboo reminded me of the shores of the Irrawadi." 2 



1 'To the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi,' Eng. trans., 1876, p. 323. 



2 The richness of the vegetation in the vicinity of the Falls and 

 on the Zambesi generally, is also specially commented on by Dr. Holub 



