THE REGION SOUTH OF THE ZAMBESI. 
287 
Besides the two large ones already described, rain¬ 
bows are of frequent occurrence, some of them much 
broken, whilst others appear and disappear rapidly, the 
result of the movement of the veil of spray. 
After the Zambesi has made its way through the 
pass two hundred and seventy feet wide, it rolls on in 
sinuous fashion, describing three or four wide curves. 
The bed is so narrow that its depth must be enormous 
to accommodate such a vast volume of water. The 
banks consist of perpendicular rocks five hundred or 
six hundred feet high, absolutely inaccessible to men, 
though many baboons, which have taken up their abode 
here, climb up and down them with ease. 
I had large pieces of rock broken off and rolled down 
by the Kaffirs, as I wanted to test the depth of the 
river by the time they took to fall; but they dis¬ 
appeared, and I did not even see any water splash up. 
Anyone not already overwhelmed with the grandeur of 
the Falls themselves, would doubtless admire the 
gloomy beauty of this awful ravine through which the 
gigantic stream rolls, blustering along on its farther 
course; but after such sensations as those I had 
experienced, astonishment is not easily again aroused. 
Charles Livingstone, brother of the great traveller, 
Dr. Coverley, already mentioned in this book, and 
another friend of mine, Mr. Charles Ellis, of London, 
had all seen both the Victoria Falls and those of 
Niagara, and they all agreed in giving the palm of 
beauty to the former. 
Of course I took some more observations, and the 
difference between the latitude I obtained and that 
given by Livingstone was only 35", by which I place 
the Falls so much (35") more north. The error in the 
compass by azimuth observation in June 1870 was 20° 
O' 26" W. To ascertain the longitude, I observed 
fourteen distances between the sun and moon, and the 
average of these gave a difference of only four minutes 
of longitude from that obtained on the Masue stream. 
Livingstone, who made his observations with a pocket 
chronometer, which showed the mean Greenwich time, 
