There is no change in the scenery, little to give warning of the wonder that one approaches. Only, above the noise of the train, a far-off murmur of sound grows upon the ear; and a little while later, floating upward from out the forest, there comes in sight a long line of snowy vapor, which, as the low sun touches it, glows with soft, many-colored lights. This mist-cloud is caused by the sudden narrowing of the great Zambesi River in the Chasm, not two hundred yards wide, which receives the Falls at the end of their leap. The cloud rises at times as much as five hundred feet into the air, and there condenses into rain, which falls in eternal showers glorious in this thirsty land, and makes in the country close about the Falls one perpetual spring.
This tract of land is known as the Rain Forest, and in its tropical magnificence, its soft and delicate beauty, can surely be surpassed by nothing on earth. All about the path laboriously cut through its jungles, rise the trunks of splendid trees, which seem to tower into the very sky; their stems, and the earth about them, are hidden in masses of giant ferns, whose long sprays sway and quiver continually under the weight of the falling drops. Strange plants of many kinds grow here; orchids droop from the trees, and palms raise their graceful heads from out the tangle. Through it all drift the rainbow vapors, and from between the trees the sun strikes in long, slanting rays, and lights up the wet vegetation, the rising mist, the falling raindrops, with an effect so tenderly and unutterably lovely that it often brings tears to the eyes.
In places the forest is more open, and here the giant Rhodesian grass grows, twelve feet high, its flower-heads heavy with wet; and palms, free from the jungle and able to grow as they will, rise thirty feet into the air, their every fringed leaf hung with gems.
At any time a few steps will take the traveler from out this Forest of Rainbows, to where he may stand on the very verge of the terrific Chasm. Here he is directly opposite the Falls, which come rushing over the further tip in a mass of foam as white as snow, to fall with a roar more than four hundred feet into the dreadful abyss. By leaning over, it is possible at times to see the river at the bottom, a boiling, turbulent torrent racing furiously to the right along its rock-bound bed; but more often all is hidden in the mist, which is hurled upward so densely that in places the Chasm seems choked with it, and it rushes past the observer with an audible sound and a suggestion of irresistible force, awe-inspiring to a degree. Opposite the Main Falls, a spot known to the natives as Shongwe, the Caldron, it is so heavy as to blot out sky, forest, and even the Falls themselves, and we are in a strange twilight, half smothered in vapors and wholly deafened with the thunderous roar of the Falls so close at hand.
Everywhere are double rainbows of surpassing brightness, sometimes arches, sometimes complete, glowing circles. They are so close, one may watch their melting colors as in a soapbubble; and they move and change continually with the sun or the movements of the spectator. They gleam softly in the cloud, brilliantly against the stern black cliffs; and tiny rainbows by hundreds dance in the falling sheets of water and among the palms and ferns of the forest.
A strange circumstance cannot fail to strike the observer, and awe him, as perhaps nothing else could, with a sense of the vast depth of the fissure into which he fearfully gazes. The spray and rain bring into being hundreds of streams, which flash over the edge of the cliff opposite the Falls in an eternal effort to rejoin their parent river. But they never reach the bottom. Long before they are half-way down, they vanish, dissipated once more into spray, and borne upward in the form of lighted mist.
Of the radiant beauty of the whole scene, one writer, a traveler of renown, says:
"I believe that on that day I was gazing at the most perfectly beautiful spectacle of all this beautiful world.
"As the sun's rays fell on that kaleidoscopic, ever-moving, changing scene, made up of rock, water, mist, and shivering foliage, the coloring of it all was gorgeous, yet of sweetly tender tints under that luminous, pearly atmosphere formed by the spray-mist. Below, where one caught glimpses of the rushing water, it was turned brown and golden, blue and rich dark green. The cliff, sparkling with dripping water, was of shining black and glowing bronze. The foliage of the Rain Forest was of the green of an eternal spring, and a myriad jewels of twinkling light were made by the water-drops on the trembling leaves. A glorious rainbow spanned the Chasm, and other rainbows flitted in the haze. As for the tender, pale beauty of the Cataract and of the luminous, pearly mist, no words could convey it to the imagination."
Another writer says: "The beauty of the pearl-tinted atmosphere, and the glory of the dazzling rainbows, are the first and the last impressions that the Victoria Falls give to the mind."