VICTORIA TALLB. 
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 mado 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 idoa of what takes place at this, the most wonderful 
sight I had witnessed in Africa. In looking down into the 
Assure on the right of the island, one seeB 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.) Prom this cloud rushed up a great jot 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 smoko, and came back in a constant 
shower, which soon wetted us to the skin. This shower 
Allis chiefly on the opposito side of the fissure, and a few 
yards back from the lip thore stands a straight hedge of 
evergreen trees, whose loaves 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. 
