If you follow with your eyes this calm, reposeful river, now hiding itself beneath its protecting banks with their wealth of branching trees, tall cocoanut palms, and luxuriant undergrowth, now emerging like a huge blue serpent encrusted with diamonds, so brightly does the clear water sparkle in the sun, you note that it finally loses itself in a heavy, impenetrable mass of green forest.

And now for a few moments the newcomer is puzzled to account for a dense white cloud, arisen apparently from nowhere, which is resting where the forest is thickest and most verdant, now larger, then smaller, anon denser or more filmy, but never changing its place, never disappearing, while the distant thunder, to which you had almost got accustomed, strikes upon your ear and gives the explanation you are seeking.
Yes, that white cloud has been there for centuries, and will be there while the world lasts, in spite of trains, bridges, etc.

It marks the Victoria Falls, and is a landmark for many miles round.

How amazed must the great Livingstone and his intrepid followers have been to see this first sign of their grand discovery after their weary march through a country of dense forests and sandy wastes, the natural features of which could not in the least have suggested such marvels as exist in the stupendous river and the water-power to which it gives birth! When mentioning that great explorer--whose name in this district, after a lapse of nearly fifty years, remains a household word among the natives, handed down from father to son--it is a curious fact, and one that should prove a lesson to many travellers from the old world as well as from the new, that only on one tree is he believed to have cut his initials in Africa, and that tree stands on the island in the centre of the Zambesi, the island that bears his name, and that absolutely overhangs and stems the centre of the awe-inspiring cataract.
I must now try in a few words to give a short account of what we saw at the Victoria Falls in July, 1903, when the breath of civilization had scarcely touched them.

To-day they are easy of access, and the changes that have been wrought have come so swiftly that, no doubt, recent visitors will scarcely recognize the localities of which I write.