IN RAINBOW-LANDBY AMY SUTHERLAND
Until only a few years ago, the Greatest Wonder of the World lay hidden away in one of the most savage parts of Africa. The natives of that region, terrified by its mysterious columns of vapor and its subterranean thunder, did not venture within many miles of it. The white men who had looked upon it could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
And yet, more than fifty years have passed since the explorer Livingstone, journeying eastward along the Zambesi, first beheld that rainbow mist rise above the forest. Of its cause he could learn nothing from the savages; and so, except for his own conjectures, he came quite unprepared upon his splendid discovery. He approached it by the river, which above the Falls is a mile wide, and below them runs for fifty miles at the bottom of a gorge between four and five hundred feet deep, whose twin walls of black, precipitous rock show for all that distance scarcelya ledge or slope where the smallest plant may cling. So, after a peep downward at the Falls, from the island on their brink which now bears his name, he left his new-found marvel less than half seen, and departed whence he came.
And the loneliness of those vast solitudes brooded once more over forest and river, to be broken only at rare intervals by some wandering hunter, or perhaps by a party of men adventuring through endless toil and danger to behold a wonder whose fame, even then, spread as far as that tiny portion of South Africa where white men dwelt and civilization held sway. So things remained until the day of Cecil Rhodes, under whose auspices went forth thevoortrekkers, or pioneers, to colonize the vast land now called Rhodesia, in the heart of which the Victoria Falls lie. Many of these voortrekkers, and their wives and children, died at the hands of the savage Amatabele tribe of natives; but the survivors in the end were victorious, and the country became their own.
Cecil Rhodes died, and was laid in his lonely grave among the Matopo Hills, on a rocky summit which looks far out over the land he loved. But his wishes were remembered, the greatestand the least of them; and still, year by year, the Central African Railway grows, every year a little, northward through the forests. And now it has reached the Zambesi, and over that hitherto unconquerable gorge has been thrown one of the most wonderful railway bridges ever built; and close by has sprung up a great hotel, so that the Victoria Falls and their surroundings are attainable at last by all the world.
For many days the approaching traveler has been flying through a mighty tropical forest, in which a path has been cut for the railway line, but which is otherwise so undisturbed, so vast and silent and lonely, that it is hard to believe white men can ever make a home in it. Here the lion prowls at his own sweet will, and legions of antelopes, great and small, graze on the sweet veldt. And here elephants wander in troops of fifty or more, and in the swamps the hippopotamus plows his way through the papyrus reed and the ten-foot Rhodesian grass. The little iron shanties of the railway men are the only signs of civilized life. The natives of the country are few and far between; their kraals, with the conical huts peculiar to this race of Africans, look down from the rare, slight eminences.
There is no change in the scenery, little to give warning of the wonder that one approaches. Only, above the noise of the train, a far-off murmur of sound grows upon the ear; and a little while later, floating upward from out the forest, there comes in sight a long line of snowy vapor, which, as the low sun touches it, glows with soft, many-colored lights. This mist-cloud is caused by the sudden narrowing of the great Zambesi River in the Chasm, not two hundred yards wide, which receives the Falls at the end of their leap. The cloud rises at times as much as five hundred feet into the air, and there condenses into rain, which falls in eternal showers glorious in this thirsty land, and makes in the country close about the Falls one perpetual spring.
This tract of land is known as the Rain Forest, and in its tropical magnificence, its soft and delicate beauty, can surely be surpassed by nothing on earth. All about the path laboriously cut through its jungles, rise the trunks of splendid trees, which seem to tower into the very sky; their stems, and the earth about them, are hidden in masses of giant ferns, whose long sprays sway and quiver continually under the weight of the falling drops. Strange plants of many kindsgrow here; orchids droop from the trees, and palms raise their graceful heads from out the tangle. Through it all drift the rainbow vapors, and from between the trees the sun strikes in long, slanting rays, and lights up the wet vegetation, the rising mist, the falling raindrops, with an effect so tenderly and unutterably lovely that it often brings tears to the eyes.
In places the forest is more open, and here the giant Rhodesian grass grows, twelve feet high, its flower-heads heavy with wet; and palms, free from the jungle and able to grow as they will, rise thirty feet into the air, their every fringed leaf hung with gems.
At any time a few steps will take the traveler from out this Forest of Rainbows, to where he may stand on the very verge of the terrific Chasm. Here he is directly opposite the Falls, which come rushing over the further tip in a mass of foam as white as snow, to fall with a roar more than four hundred feet into the dreadful abyss. By leaning over, it is possible at times to see the river at the bottom, a boiling, turbulent torrent racing furiously to the right along its rock-bound bed; but more often all is hidden in the mist, which is hurled upward so densely that in places theChasm seems choked with it, and it rushes past the observer with an audible sound and a suggestion of irresistible force, awe-inspiring to a degree. Opposite the Main Falls, a spot known to the natives as Shongwe, the Caldron, it is so heavy as to blot out sky, forest, and even the Falls themselves, and we are in a strange twilight, half smothered in vapors and wholly deafened with the thunderous roar of the Falls so close at hand.
Everywhere are double rainbows of surpassing brightness, sometimes arches, sometimes complete, glowing circles. They are so close, one may watch their melting colors as in a soapbubble; and they move and change continually with the sun or the movements of the spectator. They gleam softly in the cloud, brilliantly against the stern black cliffs; and tiny rainbows by hundreds dance in the falling sheets of water and among the palms and ferns of the forest.
A strange circumstance cannot fail to strike the observer, and awe him, as perhaps nothing else could, with a sense of the vast depth of the fissure into which he fearfully gazes. The spray and rain bring into being hundreds of streams, which flash over the edge of the cliff opposite theFalls in an eternal effort to rejoin their parent river. But they never reach the bottom. Long before they are half-way down, they vanish, dissipated once more into spray, and borne upward in the form of lighted mist.
Of the radiant beauty of the whole scene, one writer, a traveler of renown, says:
"I believe that on that day I was gazing at the most perfectly beautiful spectacle of all this beautiful world.
"As the sun's rays fell on that kaleidoscopic, ever-moving, changing scene, made up of rock, water, mist, and shivering foliage, the coloring of it all was gorgeous, yet of sweetly tender tints under that luminous, pearly atmosphere formed by the spray-mist. Below, where one caught glimpses of the rushing water, it was turned brown and golden, blue and rich dark green. The cliff, sparkling with dripping water, was of shining black and glowing bronze. The foliage of the Rain Forest was of the green of an eternal spring, and a myriad jewels of twinkling light were made by the water-drops on the trembling leaves. A glorious rainbow spanned the Chasm, and other rainbows flitted in the haze. As for the tender, pale beauty of the Cataract and of theluminous, pearly mist, no words could convey it to the imagination."
Another writer says: "The beauty of the pearl-tinted atmosphere, and the glory of the dazzling rainbows, are the first and the last impressions that the Victoria Falls give to the mind."
The eastern extremity of the cliff opposite the Falls is known as Danger Point; and here the Chasm turns abruptly at right angles, and becomes the famous Gorge which for fifty miles zigzags across country, with the Zambesi like a silver cord at the bottom of it. Just at the turning-point, a mass of rock has fallen from the cliff and lies below in the river—a mass which, it is interesting to note, Livingstone describes as justready to fall, and which in his drawing of the scene is represented as almost parted from the rest. Along the Gorge a strong, cold wind blows always, and bears the mist as far as the railway bridge and the exquisite palm groves near it.
Above the Falls, the scene is scarcely less fair. Here lies the broad Zambesi, placid and calm under its sunny skies, with its fifty islands, palm-crowned, wonderful, kept ever green and spring-like by the soft spray-showers. On the banksgrows the burly baobab, whose trunk is as large as a house; lovely forest fringes either shore, and gay-plumaged birds flit among the flowering trees and feast on the plentiful wild fruits. From here the mists of Victoria take the form of five towering pillars, bending with the wind, white below, but dark farther up, where they condense into rain. Livingstone says of the river at this point: "No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed elsewhere. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight."
The monstrous footprints of the hippopotami are thick along the banks, and crocodiles lie sunning themselves in the open spaces. Tiny gray monkeys, with wise black faces, swing from the miles of creeper which festoon the trees. Green parrots shriek, and strange great reptiles crash a path through the tangle. The savage natives punt or paddle their dugouts on the placid bosom of the river. So recent is the white man's advent that the whole is scarcely changed from the day when David Livingstone first looked upon it and realized, with beating heart, the Wonder he had found.