At the lower end of the valley the rocky spurs again approach each other, and the river forces its way through a narrow defile in which, in flood time, the water rises to a height of sixty feet above its original level. Here are situated the Gonye Falls which are a serious impediment to the navigation of the Upper Zambesi. But there is no such danger or difficulty here for canoes as poor Stanley met with on the Congo. Practice has made the natives, living near the falls, experts in the work of transporting these canoes over the rocky ground and, as soon as a boat approaches the rapids from above or below, it is whisked without difficulty by a pair of sturdy arms to the quiet water beyond. Below the Gonye Falls, the water bounds and rolls and bounces from bank to bank and chafes over the boulders in an alarming manner, their breadth being contracted to a few hundred yards. But these swollen rapids might all be ascended, Livingstone thinks, when the river is full. After many leagues of this mad gamboling, the Zambesi settles down again for a hundred miles to sober flow, and opens out into a magnificent navigable river a mile or two from bank to bank. [Illustration: THE GONYE FALLS.] Still more grand, however, are its dimensions after it receives a great deep, dark colored, slow flowing river, the Cuando, or Chobe, before mentioned. The Chobe empties through several mouths with winding channels fringed with beds of papyrus, the stems of which are plaited and woven together into an almost solid mass of vines, and by grass with keen, sharp, serrated edges, which cut like razors. Even the hippopotamus has no little ado in forcing a way through this forest, and less weighty personages have to walk humbly in his track. So wide is the Zambesi below the entrance of the Chobe, that even the practiced native eye cannot tell from the bank whether the land, dimly seen beyond, is an island or opposite shore, and the stream flows placidly past with no sign that it is almost within sight of a tremendous downfall. The only traveller who has explored the upper waters of the Chobe is Major Serpa Pinto, on his recent journey from Benguela to Natal. But we shall learn more of his travels hereafter. It is, however, interesting now to note that he found a spot on this river also, where he could almost have placed his cap on the point of junction between streams draining toward the Atlantic, the Zambesi, the Indian Ocean, and the Kalihari Desert.