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.
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