st 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. 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 whi