number are so remote that till within the last quarter of a century they were still unknown to the white man, and even now have not been seen by more than a few score of Europeans. And finally there is something in the setting and the movement of the falls,-the smooth slide of the great river over the lip of the abyss; the crash of the waters as they plunge into the chasm or are shivered on the rocks below; the smoke-spray now rising in mighty columns into the sky, now drifting, interlaced with rainbows, in the breeze; the framework of vegetation, tropical, it may be, in its superb luxuriance; and lastly the course of the current, as collecting itself after the leap it tears its way, often through gorges of indescribable grandeur, there is something in all this that presents a variety of effect, both sensational and aesthetic, with which even the greatest of mountains, immovable and unchanging in its bulk, austere in its snowy purity, terrible in its majesty, and remote with its unscaled precipices and its untrodden peaks, cannot vie. Another element of difference is that while the mountains have no voice but that of the storm, the great waterfall never ceases to thunder even under the brightest of skies, and fills the spectator with awe as well as admiration.

Fortune has never enabled me to visit the magnificent Falls of Kaietuk (commonly called Kaieteur) in British Guiana, where the River Potaro, a confluent of the Essequibo, hurls itself into a basin 740 feet below; nor the Iguasu Falls

of the Parana River in the Argentine, rushing through an archipelago of islands and plunging into a gorge of surpassing beauty; nor the Tequendama Falls, nearly 450 feet high, near Bogota in Colombia; nor the Grand Falls of Labrador-all of the above in the American Continent; nor again the Orange River Falls in South Africa, the ugliest waterfall, situated in the most repellent surroundings, in the world. As these are so little known I add a chapter about them and about some others which may be of interest to those who desire to study and to visit these wonders of Nature.

But I have seen Niagara, of which I will say nothing, except that man is hard at work despoiling and defaming this masterpiece of Nature; the two falls of the Yellowstone; the various waterfalls of the Yosemite, of which something will be said in my second volume; the wonder-spot of Gersoppa in South India; and the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi, which, as perhaps the most astonishing of all, I propose here to describe.

Known to the natives as Mosioatunya or the Smoke Sounding, they were first discovered by Livingstone in 1855. Now that the country, in British hands, has been opened up by the railway, they are accessible to any one who, being in South Africa, can spare the time for the long journey from Cape Town or Natal to the river. Of such a scene a photograph is more eloquent than any description; nor am I clear that any word-picture of any great waterfall that I have ever read has

given me an adequate idea of the reality. If, then, I reproduce what I wrote about the Victoria Falls, directly I had seen them, it is not so much that I hope to succeed where others have failed, as that, having penned the following words in the train that took me away from the Zambesi, they may possess the slight merit of a vivid and unblurred impression.

In all countries where there is a dry and a wet season a waterfall will differ greatly at different seasons of the year. Gersoppa is nearly dry before the end of the cold weather; but after the rains the volume of water discharged into the chasm, which is nearly 900 feet in sheer depth, is so great that the fall itself is rendered invisible by the spray. The same holds true of the Victoria Falls. They are at their lowest before the rains, which begin in December; and visitors in the dry season-i.e., between September and Decemberconsole themselves for the relatively meagre wisps and driblets of water which in many parts of the fall are all that come over the edge, by the better opportunities that they enjoy of examining the walls of the great chasm which the resistless river has been eating through unnumbered ages into the heart of the black basalt. At that season a man can wade across many parts of the river at no great distance from the top of the fall, for the water is seldom more than two feet to three feet in depth, and often much less. Large sections of the black cliff are entirely exposed, and it is possible to walk out from Cataract Island or from

Livingstone Island, which are both on the top of the falls, and to stand on the very brink of the naked edge. The Devil's Cataract, adjoining the left bank, and the Rainbow Fall, in the centre, are then the only considerable mass of water; and, as appears from the photographs that are taken at that period, even the Rainbow Fall, which was of surpassing grandeur when I saw it, and presented an uninterrupted sheet of water, is split up into separate cascades. On the other hand, when the sun is shining, which it is more apt to do in the dry weather, the effect of the rainbows, tilted against the fall at innumerable angles, and following the spectator with their scintillating hoops as he moves, is finer and more constant.

It is in April and May, when, though the rain has ceased at the falls, the swollen water from the uplands far in the interior reaches them, that they are at their highest, and then the river pours in a flood like that of Niagara over the lip, and plunges in an unbroken sheet into the shrouded abyss below. This must be a glorious spectacle. But such is the density and fury of the spray-storm rising into the air like the smoke of some vast cauldron, that the spectator within 100 yards of the cataract can see nothing at all, and gets little beyond a drenching for his pains.

Perhaps a visitor at the " mean epoch-i.e., when the rains have been sufficient to fill the river and produce a great mass of water, but not so overwhelming as to blot out the view-is the most fortunate. Anyhow these differences of season

and their effects are enough to account for the widely different verdicts that have been passed upon the Victoria Falls by those who have described them. They are also responsible for the complete inadequacy of any photographic representation to do justice to the majestic grandeur of the scene. It is clear that, when the river is in flood and the falls are concealed behind an impenetrable screen of spray, no camera can be used with effect. This explains why the majority of illustrations in books, which were naturally taken under favourable conditions of sky and sun, are so inadequate. At low water the photographer, or, for the matter of that, the sightseer, should be warned off.

One of the glories of Niagara is the great sweep of water, deep and swift and irresistible, in the bed of the river above the cataract. The Zambesi presents a very different spectacle. Although at a short distance above the falls it expands into a broad lake, where regattas can be held and sailing is a safe and agreeable pastime, as it approaches the hidden chasm it becomes parcelled up into innumerable channels and rapids running through boulders and between grassy tufts and islets, and is in many parts fordable in dry weather. A canoe can then take the sightseer with perfect safety to any of the larger islands, and will probably run aground on the way. The two islands most commonly visited, because they are on the lip of the fall, are Cataract Island and Livingstone Island; on the latter, the tree upon which