Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/347

 *ization of many other varieties; an American bride who is not taken to Niagara on her wedding trip, may get a divorce on that ground, if the fact is presented to a court of proper jurisdiction, but Victoria is in a wild country in the mountains of Africa, seventeen hundred miles from Capetown, and Capetown is nineteen days from London, and twenty-nine from New York. Niagara makes a straight leap, whereas Victoria is more of a cataract. At Niagara, a great solid wall of sea-green water pours over a precipice; here, the force of the fall is broken in many places by huge rocks—at one place the fall is separated by a wooded island, and there are many other smaller breaks. At Niagara, the river above the fall is clean and swift, with no rocks. At Victoria, the river above the fall is broken into a thousand different islands; it looks like a shallow river overflowing in brush and timber land after a torrent of rain, and much of the water pouring over the falls is yellow and dirty Victoria Falls is in shape like a huge capital T; the falls represented by the top of the letter, and the outlet by the stem. The water pours into a great pool a mile long, and escapes by a narrow outlet not more than 150 feet wide in places. The water pours into the pool with a roar that may be heard twenty-eight miles, and stirs up a spray that causes constant rain to fall in its immediate territory. This spray is so great that it looks like a cloud against the sky, and may be seen before you hear the roar of the falls Yet the water from this great pool escapes almost as quietly as water from an undisturbed lake. After the water escapes from the great pool below the falls, through the stem of the letter T,