38 
THE NEW AFRICA 
The river, above the falls fully a mile and a quarter wide and 
about forty feet deep at this season of the year, falls into this crack 
or chasm, which is about six hundred feet wide, running trans¬ 
versely to the river bed, in a sheer drop of over four hundred and 
fifty feet. The roar of the falling water here is so great that it 
makes conversation in the neighbourhood quite impossible even 
by shouting. Owing to the confined space into which the water 
falls, strong air currents are forced upward, that carry fine spray 
in the form of clouds aloft, a never ending supply from below 
sustaining the volume at the base of these towering masses, 
which spread like a huge canopy at the top, or in rainy weather 
unite their columns with the clouds in the heavens. These 
clouds, in which the sun shining forms concentric rainbows of 
marvellous beauty, condense in mid air, and inundate the 
ground beneath with phenomenal showers of rain falling at 
intervals of every few minutes, which saturate the ground, and 
cause unusual fertility; the thick grown vegetation on the 
brink of the chasm, is defined with the precision of a well- 
clipped garden hedge. The rocks, constantly subjected to the 
ever falling moisture, are covered with a slippery moss, very 
dangerous to those approaching too near the edge of the chasm 
opposite the falls. The long matted grass growing in some open 
patches near the falls, left to decay for many seasons, has formed 
a springy, spongy foundation, most tedious and difficult to force 
a passage through. 
At a corner on the south right bank on top of the falls, 
where the edge of the rock has been worn away, the water 
rushes with marvellous velocity in unbroken surface down the 
incline for a distance of fifty yards, the green, scintillating, 
rushing mass exercising almost a mesmeric inviting influence on 
the gazer, until, for safety’s sake, it is perhaps best to depart from 
the spot to avoid the attraction. Below, by the north left bank 
of the falls, is the exit of all this mass of water through a 
narrow channel six hundred feet wide, with perpendicular walls 
of columnar basalt nearly five hundred feet high from the water. 
From a calculation based upon the volume, depth, and speed of 
