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. This shower falls chiefly
on the opposite side of the fissure, and a few yards back from the lip there
stands a straight hedge of evergreen trees, whose leaves 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.
On the left of the island we see the water at the bottom,
a white rolling mass moving away to the prolongation of the fissure,
which branches off near the left bank of the river. A piece of the rock
has fallen off a spot on the left of the island, and juts out
from the water below, and from it I judged the distance which the water falls
to be about 100 feet.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 416 of 572
Words from 222622 to 223122
of 306638
