At
One Part A Bare Mountain Spur Barred The Way, And Had To Be
Surmounted By A Perilous And Circuitous
Route, along which the crags
were so hot that it was scarcely possible for the hand to hold on
long
Enough to ensure safety in the passage; and had the foremost of
the party lost his hold, he would have hurled all behind him into the
river at the foot of the promontory; yet in this wild hot region, as
they descended again to the river, they met a fisherman casting his
hand-net into the boiling eddies, and he pointed out the cataract of
Morumbwa; within an hour they were trying to measure it from an
overhanging rock, at a height of about one hundred feet. When you
stand facing the cataract, on the north bank, you see that it is
situated in a sudden bend of the river, which is flowing in a short
curve; the river above it is jammed between two mountains in a
channel with perpendicular sides, and less than fifty yards wide; one
or two masses of rock jut out, and then there is a sloping fall of
perhaps twenty feet in a distance of thirty yards. It would stop all
navigation, except during the highest floods; the rocks showed that
the water then rises upwards of eighty feet perpendicularly.
Still keeping the position facing the cataract, on its right side
rises Mount Morumbwa from 2000 to 3000 feet high, which gives the
name to the spot.
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