The interior table-land, especially towards the mid-course of the Zambesi, is intersected by lofty mountain-chains. It is in this region, and at the southernmost point of the river's great Delta, which is 270 miles in length, that the famous Falls occur, named by the natives "Mosioatounya," or "Smoke-resounding," re-christened by Livingstone, the Victoria. Their vast columns of vapour are visible at a distance of five or six miles, and might suggest to an American traveller the rolling clouds that ascend from a burning prairie. The banks and islands of the river are here enriched with sylvan vegetation of every variety of form and colour: the mighty baobab, each of whose enormous arms would form the trunk of a large tree; the graceful palm, with its crest of plume-like foliage; the silvery mohonams, whose leaves sparkle in the sunshine like Achilles' shield; and the nutsouri, abounding in clusters of pleasant scarlet fruit. The Falls are bounded on three sides by densely-wooded ridges 300 or 400 feet in height, and may be likened to a flood of water a thousand yards broad, suddenly hurled over a basaltic precipice 100 feet in depth, and then as suddenly compressed into a narrow gully not more than fifteen or twenty yards across. "If one imagines," says Dr. Livingstone,[84] "the Thames filled with low tree-covered hills immediately below the Tunnel, extending as far as Gravesend, the bed of black basaltic rock instead of London mud, and a fissure made therein from one end of the Tunnel to the other, down through the keystones of the arch, and prolonged from the left end of the Tunnel through thirty miles of hills; then fancy the Thames leaping bodily into the gulf, and forced there to change its direction and flow from the right to the left bank, and then rush boiling and roaring through the hills, he may have some idea of what takes place at this the most wonderful sight I have witnessed in Africa." [Illustration: VICTORIA FALLS, RIVER ZAMBESI.] In descending into the narrow abyss already spoken of, the cataract breaks into five separate streams, which send up, to an elevation of 200 or 300 feet, as many columns of luminous vapour--pillars of shivering spray, and foam, and diamond sparkle, which in the sunlight are gloriously wreathed with the rare hues of Iris. "How profound The gulf! and how the giant element From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound, Crushing the cliffs, which, downward worn and rent With his fierce footsteps, yield in chasms a vent To the broad column which rolls on."--(_Byron._) In descending the Zambesi, we encounter the great river Kafue, which flows from the north. Beyond the point of confluence the country becomes opener, freer, and healthier, and we arrive at the Portuguese town of Tété.