A Stone Dropped In Became Less And Less To The Eye,
And At Last Disappeared In The Dense Mist Below.
Charles Livingstone had seen Niagara, and gave Mosi-oa-tunya the
palm, though now at the end of a drought, and the river at its very
lowest.
Many feel a disappointment on first seeing the great
American Falls, but Mosi-oa-tunya is so strange, it must ever cause
wonder. In the amount of water, Niagara probably excels, though not
during the months when the Zambesi is in flood. The vast body of
water, separating in the comet-like forms described, necessarily
encloses in its descent a large volume of air, which, forced into the
cleft, to an unknown depth, rebounds, and rushes up loaded with
vapour to form the three or even six columns, as if of steam, visible
at the Batoka village Moachemba, twenty-one miles distant. On
attaining a height of 200, or at most 300 feet from the level of the
river above the cascade, this vapour becomes condensed into a
perpetual shower of fine rain. Much of the spray, rising to the west
of Garden Island, falls on the grove of evergreen trees opposite; and
from their leaves, heavy drops are for ever falling, to form sundry
little rills, which, in running down the steep face of rock, are
blown off and turned back, or licked off their perpendicular bed, up
into the column from which they have just descended.
The morning sun gilds these columns of watery smoke with all the
glowing colours of double or treble rainbows.
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