Just as every visitor to the United States heads straight for Niagara, so every visitor to South Africa purchases forthwith a ticket to the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, the mighty cataract in the heart of Rhodesia which is the greatest natural wonder in the Dark Continent and, perhaps, in the world. The natives call the falls _Mosi-oa-tunya_, which means “Thundering Smoke,” and you appreciate the name's significance when your train halts at daybreak at a wayside station, sixty miles away, and you see above the tree-tops a cloud of smoky vapour and hear a low humming like a million sewing-machines. It is so utterly impossible for the eye, the mind, and the imagination to grasp the size, grandeur, and beauty of the Victoria Falls that it is futile to attempt to describe them. If you can picture an unbroken sheet of water forty city blocks in width, or as long as from the Grand Central Station, in New York, to Washington Square, hurtling over a precipice twice as high as the Flatiron Building, you will have the best idea that I can give you of what the Victoria Falls are like. They are unique in that the level of the land above the falls is the same as that below, the entire breadth of the second greatest river in Africa falling precipitately into a deep and narrow chasm, from which the only outlet is an opening in the rock less than one hundred yards wide. From the Boiling Pot, as this seething caldron of waters is called, the contents of the Zambezi rush with unbridled fury through a deep and narrow gorge of basaltic cliffs, which, nowhere inferior to the rapids at Niagara, extends with many zigzag windings for more than forty miles. My first glimpse of the falls was in the early morning, and the lovely, reeking splendour of the scene, as the great, placid river, all unconscious of its fate, rolls out of the mysterious depths of Africa, comes suddenly to the precipice's brink, and plunges in one mighty torrent into the obscurity of the cavern below, the rolling clouds of spray, the trembling earth, the sombre rain-forest on the opposite bank, and a rainbow stealing over all, made a picture which will remain sharp and clear in my memory as long as I live. The Outer Lands are almost all exploited; the work of the pioneer and the frontiersman is nearly finished, and in another decade or so we shall see their like no more. Rhodesia is the last of the great new countries open to colonisation under Anglo-Saxon ideals of government and climatically suitable for the propagation of the Anglo-Saxon race. Though the handful of hardy settlers who have already made it their home speak with the burr of the shires instead of the drawl of the plains; though they wear corded riding-breeches instead of leather “chaps”; and stuff Cavendish into their pipes instead of rolling their cigarettes from Bull Durham, they and the passing plainsmen of our own West are, when all is said and done, brothers under their skins.