Victoria Falls.
Zambezi Bridge and Gorge Below Falls.
Note.—The parallel wall against which the flow dashes is equal in height to the precipice over which the water passes, the picture being drawn with a view of affording a clearer conception of Victoria's wide descent.
After the water storms through the 200-foot wide channel the torrent travels several hundred feet, when it flows under the Zambezi railway bridge, 450 feet above. On it turbulently runs, the water befoamed, through high, perpendicular walls of basaltic rock for over a mile. The rocky banks then decrease, but the course of the river remains rugged and tortuous for a distance of 40 miles.
Vegetation growing about the falls, particularly palm trees, adds much attractiveness to the environment. The absence of improvements—save for the bridge, together with grass-thatched native huts showing dimly through the vegetation on the banks; the evergreen islands; the stillness of the water before making its plunge, contrasted with the wild-appearing, rugged, high, rocky walls below and the foaming and billowy torrent as it dashes madly through the narrow gorge—make Victoria, like other great works of nature, distinctive in formation from other notable waterfalls.
Summing up the comparative grandeur and greatness of Niagara and Victoria Falls, most persons who have seen both would decide, I believe, that Niagara Falls is the more beautiful and Victoria the greater. In this connection one has only to compare the grand crescent of sky-blue water of Niagara with the dull color of Victoria Falls, the water of Niagara, after plunging over an unbroken stretch of rock ledge into a roomy, circular-shaped basin, assuming its true blue color, with the gradual narrowing of the banks to the Gorge; contrast Niagara's broad, sweeping, unconfined character with the water of the Zambezi, hemmed in from view in tank-like walls after passing over the falls, and then prevented from making a good showing, as it were, by a continuation of similar walls for a distance of 40 miles.
The bridge across the Zambezi River is a pretty one, with a single span of 610 feet, and was constructed by an American firm. Cecil Rhodes instructed the builders to erect it where it now stands, "so that it would always be wet by spray from the falls."
Nature's fickleness, a trait disclosed in choosing remote regions for some of her noted wonders, entailing, as it does, long journeys, fatigue and much expense to reach, is conspicuous by her placing Victoria in a country hemmed in on the west by Angola and German West Africa, north by the Belgian Congo, northeast by German East Africa, east by Portuguese East Africa, and south by Bechuanaland and the Transvaal. The shortest time in which a journey could be made from an American port to these falls is about five weeks. Landing at Capetown, four days' travel, on a slow train, mostly over a dry and dusty country, must be undergone to reach that point, when Victoria Falls is viewed in all its sublimity, located in a wild, interesting, but fever-ridden, section of Rhodesia, where only a handful of languid white persons live, and on a continent where the superior race number less than a million and a half.
It is dangerous to cross the Zambezi River in a rowboat, the river being infested with crocodiles, which grow from 12 to 16 feet long. The hippopotamus, though, starts the trouble. He hides just under the water, and nothing can be seen of the beast until a boat is on top of him. Then he rises, overturning the boat. "Hippo" will not harm a person in the water; but crocodiles are generally found close to a hippopotamus, and the former are always hungry. As soon as the unfortunate occupants of a boat have been dumped overboard there is a swirl of water close by, another farther off, yet more disturbed water, when long, dull colored shapes come lashing swiftly up. The poor swimmers disappear, the muddy water reddens for a short time, and then becomes sallow colored again. To the Barotse native the crocodile is a sacred animal, and, as he will not harm the voracious beasts, deaths of both natives and Europeans by crocodiles occur frequently in this part of Rhodesia.
The Zambezi River rises in West Portuguese Africa and empties into the Indian Ocean at Chinde, Portuguese East Africa, about a thousand miles from its source.
Beer and whiskey are drunk a great deal in that part of Rhodesia, and almost every one takes quinine to allay fever. No one would dare take a drink of water were it not boiled.