No Better Proof
Of Previous Ignorance Of This River Could Be Desired Than That
An Untraveled Gentleman, Who Had Spent
A great part of his life
in the study of the geography of Africa, and knew every thing
written on
The subject from the time of Ptolemy downward,
actually asserted in the "Athenaeum", while I was coming up the Red Sea,
that this magnificent river, the Leeambye, had "no connection
with the Zambesi, but flowed under the Kalahari Desert, and became lost;"
and "that, as all the old maps asserted, the Zambesi took its rise
in the very hills to which we have now come." This modest assertion
smacks exactly as if a native of Timbuctoo should declare
that the "Thames" and the "Pool" were different rivers, he having seen
neither the one nor the other. Leeambye and Zambesi mean the very same thing,
viz., the RIVER.
Sekeletu intended to accompany me, but, one canoe only having come
instead of the two he had ordered, he resigned it to me.
After twenty minutes' sail from Kalai we came in sight,
for the first time, of the columns of vapor appropriately called "smoke",
rising at a distance of five or six miles, exactly as when
large tracts of grass are burned in Africa. Five columns now arose,
and, bending in the direction of the wind, they seemed placed against
a low ridge covered with trees; the tops of the columns at this distance
appeared to mingle with the clouds. They were white below, and higher up
became dark, so as to simulate smoke very closely. The whole scene
was extremely beautiful; the banks and islands dotted over the river
are adorned with sylvan vegetation of great variety of color and form.
At the period of our visit several trees were spangled over with blossoms.
Trees have each their own physiognomy. There, towering over all,
stands the great burly baobab, each of whose enormous arms
would form the trunk of a large tree, beside groups of graceful palms,
which, with their feathery-shaped leaves depicted on the sky,
lend their beauty to the scene. As a hieroglyphic they always mean
"far from home", for one can never get over their foreign air
in a picture or landscape. The silvery mohonono, which in the tropics
is in form like the cedar of Lebanon, stands in pleasing contrast with
the dark color of the motsouri, whose cypress-form is dotted over at present
with its pleasant scarlet fruit. Some trees resemble the great spreading oak,
others assume the character of our own elms and chestnuts; but no one
can imagine the beauty of the view from any thing witnessed in England.
It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely
must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight. The only want felt
is that of mountains in the background. The falls are bounded on three sides
by ridges 300 or 400 feet in height, which are covered with forest,
with the red soil appearing among the trees. When about half a mile
from the falls, I left the canoe by which we had come down thus far,
and embarked in a lighter one, with men well acquainted with the rapids,
who, by passing down the centre of the stream in the eddies and still places
caused by many jutting rocks, brought me to an island situated
in the middle of the river, and on the edge of the lip over which
the water rolls. In coming hither there was danger of being swept down
by the streams which rushed along on each side of the island;
but the river was now low, and we sailed where it is totally impossible to go
when the water is high. But, though we had reached the island,
and were within a few yards of the spot, a view from which would solve
the whole problem, I believe that no one could perceive
where the vast body of water went; it seemed to lose itself in the earth,
the opposite lip of the fissure into which it disappeared
being only 80 feet distant. At least I did not comprehend it until,
creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent
which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambesi,
and saw that a stream of a thousand yards broad 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 made 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 100 feet down
from the bed of the river instead of what it is, with the lips of the fissure
from 80 to 100 feet apart, then fancy the Thames leaping bodily into the gulf,
and forced there to change its direction, and flow from the right
to the left bank, and then rush boiling and roaring through the hills,
he may have some idea of what takes place at this, the most wonderful sight
I had witnessed in Africa. In looking down into the fissure
on the right of the island, one sees 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.) From this cloud rushed up a great jet of vapor
exactly like steam, and it mounted 200 or 300 feet high; there condensing,
it changed its hue to that of dark smoke, and came back in a constant shower,
which soon wetted us to the skin.
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