WONDROUS WATERFALLS.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIII, Issue 141, 12 June 1909, Page 7

WONDROUS WATERFALLS.

"THE GRANDEST SPECTACLE IN THE WORLD."

Th© Victoria Falls of the Zambesi River are graphically described by Lord Curzon of Kedleston in an article in the London Times. The edge once passed, the falls, says Lord Curzon, appear to him "to excel in grandeur any spectacle of the same kind in the world. The cliff-wall down which they are hurled is sheer from top to bottom, 350 ft to 400 ft of perpendicular descent, uninterrupted save where in some places gigantic masses of basalt, split off or eroded by the same process as has formed the chasm itself, lie at the base and shatter the descending columns into a tempest of foam. "Conceive a black well, as high as Shakspere's Cliff at Dover, nearly as high as the Cross of St. Paul's, and over a mile in length, and over the top of this tremendous precipice a continuous cataract of water toppling down from the sky, save in the three places where the larger islands, carrying their growth of jungle right to the edge of the abyss, have protected a section of the cliff and interposed a gleaming surface of ebon rock between the snowy fleeces of the falls on either side.

"In scenery, the surroundings of the Victoria Falls greatly surpass their American rival (Niagara). For every pinnacle and rocky buttress is clothed from top to bottom, at least in the rainy seasojn, with a clustering forest growth ; and the contrast of the white storm of the cataract and the gloomy swirl of the torrent, with the brilliant green of the verdure amid which it pursues its course, is a fascination that never palls. "Never can there fade from the mind of one who.has seen it the vision of those towers of descending foam, the shouting face of the cataract, the thunder of the watery phalanxes as they charge and reel and are shattered in the bottom of the abyss, or the spray-spumes whizzing .upwards like- a battery of rockets into the air."