The river for some distance--at least two miles--above the Falls is of great width, and, flowing between hills some three or four hundred feet in height, presents to the eye a smooth open surface, dotted over by a number of picturesque, tree-covered islands. Where the Falls occur the river is upwards of a mile in width, and the Falls extend the whole of this distance, their line broken at intervals by dark projecting buttresses of rock, forming, some of them, small islands with trees upon their tops; whilst others, of much less size, present merely a bare and jagged surface. The Falls are occasioned by what appears to have been a rift in the original bed of the river--a rending asunder of the rock in the river-bed, over the edge of which the whole waters of the Zambesi are poured down into a deep, narrow gorge below, its width varying from something like eighty to a hundred yards. The water escapes from this deep abyss, where it boils and foams tumultuously after its descent, by a still narrower channel of from twenty to thirty yards in width, and apparently about the same depth as the fissure into which the water falls, the waters of the river being thus suddenly compressed into this narrow limit immediately after flowing through a bed upwards of a mile in breadth just above the Falls. The river after this proceeds by a zigzag course from east to west for about five miles, through a continuation of this narrow cutting, before it finally flows away in a more direct line eastwards. This outlet, Livingstone informs us,[60] is about 1170 yards from the western and 600 from the eastern end of the abyss, the river at the Falls flowing nearly due north and south, whilst the fissure which receives the water lies nearly east and west. At this point the rushing waters from either side unite after they have fallen. “The stream ...,” writes Chapman, in his account of the Falls, referring to this portion of the river,[61] “which here slackens its speed before the entrance, steals slowly round, at the solemn pace of a funeral procession, before it escapes from its confinement between the massive columns of rock.” The water here is of “that sombre green,” says Baines in his description,[62] “which indicates great depth; the moderate rapid formed in the narrow turn below the entrance rolling in that smooth, glassy swell, almost destitute of foam, which seems so gentle and proves so overpowering when one tries to stem it.” [Illustration: VICTORIA FALLS, ZAMBESI (THE OUTLET).]