Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/158

154 a narrow opening some distance from the middle of the long opposite edge, and pursues its way through a deep gorge which winds to and fro like the strokes of the letter W several times repeated, showing clearly the successive stages by which the river bed has burrowed its way through the country. The 'rain-forest' a thick mass of trees and undergrowth, and the Palm Kloof, a ravine leading down to the bottom of the gorge, are kept moist by the shifting masses of spray. Above the falls, the banks are clothed with tropical vegetation and the long reaches of apparently calm but swiftly flowing water show little of the many hidden dangers which small craft passing along them must avoid. The marvels of nature are perhaps equalled by those of civilization.

Ten years ago not more than thirty white men are known to have visited this spot since its discovery in 1855 by Livingstone, and last year it was connected with Bulawayo by rail. The line has now been carried over the gorge just below the falls by a bridge 650 feet long and 350 feet above the water, finished last spring; it is being continued now to Lake Tanganyika, and had in September reached a point 160 miles from the Falls towards this objective. Perhaps the greatest marvel of all, as Professor Darwin remarked in opening the bridge to passenger traffic on the morning of September 12, was that his speech on that occasion should appear in full in the London afternoon papers of the same day.

Tourists will now find no difficulty in reaching the Falls nor will