"The whole body of water rolls clear over, quite unbroken; but, after a descent of ten or more feet, the entire mass suddenly becomes like a huge sheet of driven snow. Pieces of water leap off it in the form of comets with tails streaming behind, till the whole snowy sheet becomes myriads of rushing, leaping, aqueous comets. This peculiarity was not observed by Charles Livingstone at Niagara, and here it happens possibly from the dryness of the atmosphere, or whatever the cause may be which makes every drop of Zambesi water appear to possess a sort of individuality. It runs off the ends of the paddles, and glides in beads along the smooth surface, like drops of quick-silver on a table. Here we see them in a conglomeration, each with a train of pure white vapor, racing down till lost in clouds of spray. A stone dropped in became less and less to the eye, and at last disappeared in the dense mist below. "Charles Livingstone had seen Niagara, and gave Mosi-oa-tunya the palm, though now at the end of a drought, and the river at its very lowest. Many feel a disappointment on first seeing the great American falls, but Mosi-oa-tunya is so strange it must ever cause wonder. In the amount of water Niagara probably excels, though not during the months when the Zambesi is in flood. The vast body of water, separating in the comet-like forms described, necessarily encloses in its descent a large volume of air, which, forced into the cleft to an unknown depth, rebounds, and rushes up loaded with vapor, to form the three or even six columns, as if of steam, visible at the Batoka village, Moachemba, twenty-one miles distant. On attaining a height of two hundred, or at most three hundred, feet from the level of the river above the cascade this vapor becomes condensed into a perpetual shower of fine rain. Much of the spray, rising to the west of Garden Island, falls on the grove of evergreen trees opposite; and from their leaves heavy drops are forever falling, to form sundry little rills, which, in running down the steep face of rock, are blown off and turned back, or licked off their perpendicular bed up into the column from which they have just descended." [Illustration: BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF MOSI-OA-TUNYA.] CHAPTER XIX. FROM THE ALBERT N'YANZA TO FOUEIRA. The voyage of the lake was completed without any incident of importance. The time went quickly enough in visits to the islands and occasional halts on the shore, and a couple of days before the date arranged for meeting Frank the steamer reached Magungo, and ascended the Somerset River, or Victoria Nile, to the foot of Murchison Falls.