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| Chapman
J's First Impression of Victoria Falls Zimbabwe (
Mosi-oa- Tunya ) |
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We approached the brink with trembling, and carefully parting the bushes with our hands, looked at once on the first grand view of the
Victoria Falls at the west end. Picture to yourself a stupendous perpendicular rent in a mass of basaltic rock, extending more than a mile (scarcely the half of which, however, is visible) and only sixty to a hundred yards wide, right across the river, from one end to the other, into which pours this mighty river, roaring, foaming and boiling.
Then immediately before you, a large body of water, between eighty and ninety yards wide, stealing at first with rapid and snake-like undulations over the hard and slippery rock, at length leaping at an angle of thirty degrees, then forty-five degrees, for more than one
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hundred yards, and then with the impetus its rapid descent has given it, bounding bodily fifteen or twenty feet clear of the rock, and falling with thundering report into the dark and boiling chasm beneath, seeming, by its velocity, so to entrance the nervous spectator that he fancies himself being involuntarily drawn into the stream and by some invisible spell tempted to fling himself headlong into it and join in its gambols; but anon he recovers himself with a nervous start, and draws back a pace or two, gazing in awe
and wonder upon the stream as it goes leaping wildly and with 'delirious bound' over huge rocks. It is a scene of wild sublimity.
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. . . Nothing can be more delicately beautiful and pleasing to the eye than the milky. streams, broken at the top
by dividing rocks and widening to the base, pouring down in one unbroken flow of snowy whiteness from a height of upwards of three hundred feet. Little juvenile cataracts steal quietly aside, as if fearful of the overpowering crush of the great. ones, and these skip and sport down the greasy steps from rock to rock, while long, downy, snowy streamers, sometimes thick and voluminous, at other times light and airy, are swayed and wafted to and fro when the wind finds an entrance at the narrow outlet of the mighty river, which from the breadth of a mile or more, is here condensed into the narrow. space of from thirty to fifty yards, or even less, then
flowing out near its eastern extremity between high cliffs, running away to the west, and nearly doubling upon itself, then back again to the east in a very compact zigzag manner for 'about five miles, finally turning away to the east.
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| The stream pours playfully into this narrow rent, sending up volumes of spray, and the waters from the base flow westward, and, meeting there the great body of water from the west, which here slackens its speed before the entrance, steals slowly round, at the solemn .pace of a funeral procession, before it escapes from its confinement between the massive columns of rock. A large semi-circular gap having been broken away in the bank of the river forms a large, shady, almost cavernous enlargement, in which the deep, dark
waters quietly eddy about, then dash up against the rocky shore, which drives them foaming and hurrying backwards.
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| Source and copyright:
CHAPMAN, J. Travels in the Interior of South Africa, London, 1868 |
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