under the same sort of terrible necessity in our
Caffre wars as the American Professor of Chemistry said he was under,
when he dismembered the man whom he had murdered."

Again Livingstone sets out on his weary way, untrodden by white man's
foot, to pass through unknown tribes, whose savage temper might give him
his quietus at any turn of the road. There were various routes to the
sea open to him. He chose the route along the Zambesi--though the the
most difficult, and through hostile tribes--because it seemed the most
likely to answer his desire to find a commercial highway to the coast.
Not far to the east of Linyanti, he beheld for the first time those
wonderful falls of which he had only heard before, giving an English
name to them,--the first he had ever given in all his African
journeys,--the Victoria Falls. We have seen how genuine his respect was
for his Sovereign, and it was doubtless a real though quiet pleasure to
connect her name with the grandest natural phenomenon in Africa, This is
one of the discoveries[43] that have taken most hold on the popular
imagination, for the Victoria Falls are like a second Niagara, but
grander and more astonishing; but except as illustrating his views of
the structure of Africa, and the distribution of its waters, it had not
much influence, and led to no very remarkable results. Right across the
channel of the river was a deep fissure only eighty feet wide, into
which the whole volume of the river, a thousand yards broad, tumbled to
the depth of a hundred feet[44], the fissure being continued in zigzag
form for thirty miles, so that the stream had to change its course from
right to left and left to right, and went through the hills boiling and
roaring, sending up columns of steam, formed by the compression of the
water falling into its narrow wedge-shaped receptacle.

[Footnote 43: Virtually a discovery, though marked in an old map.]

[Footnote 44: Afterward ascertained by him to be 1800 yards and 820 feet
respectively.]

A discovery as to the structure of the country, long believed in by him,
but now fully verified, was of much more practical importance. It had
been ascertained by him that skirting the central hollow there were two
longitudinal ridges extremely favorable for settlements, both for
missions and merchandise. We shall hear much of this soon.

Slowly but steadily the eastward tramp is continued, often over ground
which was far from favorable for walking exerci