WATERFALLS BIGGER THAN NIAGARA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22226, 28 September 1935, Page 4 (Supplement)

WATERFALLS BIGGER THAN NIAGARA

Tho Victoria Falls, which Livingstone found, are one of Nature's strangest feats. She ordered tho great Zambesi, her African river, 1700 miles long, to cut a way through a sheet of basalt which, early in the Earth's history, had been thing upward from tho depths to a height of 3000 feet in a wedge 2000 miles wide. The river, which onco had lost itself in the Kalahari Desert, obeyed the command, turned east instead of south, and cut a gorgo over wliich its waters plunge in a fall nearly a mile wide and 420 feet deep. Tho most marvellous sight in tho world wo should call it, except that seldom can the Falls bo sten in their completeness because of the cloud of spray which rises from them, and because the river gorge winds beneath the basalt cliffs. Some parts of the year are better than others for beholding the Falls, though it is from an aeroplane only that their might, majesty, dominion, and power can be discerned in all completeness. In April the flood is deepest, and in tho winding gorgo below, the river is fifty feet higher than in November; but the spray is then so dense that tho cataracts are hidden from view. When tho spray is less, in tho dry months, the waters appear to hug tho cliffs in their descent instead of leaping them in a bold outstanding curve. But at any season they are a wonder of the world. Rainbows span the chasm in daylight; when the moon is full lunar rainbows take their place. The fall is divided, though not by an island bisecting a nearly straight line, as at Nigara. The whole architecture of Victoria Falls is less simple. The river plunges not into a chasm stretching away from it and continuing its path, but into a chasm which is stretched across to face it almost at right angles. It is this formation which makes tho vision difficult. Yet there is a path through the Rain Forest eternally watered by the spray to a point from which, on the brink of tho cnasm facing the falls, nearly twothirds of the mile-wido cataract can be seen. First there are tho Rainbow Falls, a third of a mile wide. Then comes Livingstone Island. Then come the main falls in two sections, split by a rock and half a mile wide in all. Then there is another island, and beyond it the Devil's Cataract. Below the Falls in the chasm is the Boiling Pot where the waters of the Eastern and Western cataracts meet as they rush through the chasm, to burst afterwards in a torrent through the gorge. The Railway Bridge which Cecil Rhodes planned before he died, crosses the first arm of the gorge 200 yards below the Boiling Pot, but, though the bridge is 400 feet above the torrent at low water, the spray at flood-time splashes the train windows. The Rainbow Falls are the prettiest, because of the many rainbows which sometimes make a complete circle in the spray; but the main Falls are the most awe-inspiring, perhaps because the spectator has rather to imagine them through their clouds of spray as they thunder in his ears. Only in the dry season are they quite revealed, but then seldom. The Rain Forest is a forest of dense thicket and huge trees drenched always •with tho showers of falling spray. Below the Falls the Gorge, zigzagging for six miles through its cliffs, js continued for another forty, and into it plunges in the rainy season tho 300-foot fall of tho Masuye River. When Livingstone first approached it, the sight which struck him most was that of the columns of spray rising like bush-fires and visible for five or six miles away. Ho could hear its sound then, but these great jets of vapour were what led him to describe the Falls as the Smoke Sounder. The older native name is Shongwo or Boiling Water in a Pot.