The situation demanded the consummation of some monumental piece of work. The Niagara gorge had been bridged, but the task of spanning that chasm was mere child’s play in comparison with that confronting the engineers below the Victoria Falls. The cliffs are sheer practically, for the canyon through which the water rushes for some 20 miles is but a fissure in the earth’s crust. The surveys, which were carried out with great difficulty, showed that the break would have to be bridged in a single span about 500 feet in length from brink to brink, with the rails over 420 feet above low water. For purposes of comparison, it may be mentioned that, although the structure of the same type thrown across the Niagara gorge to carry the Grand Trunk railway from Canadian to American soil has a main span 50 feet wider, while the bridge itself is almost twice as long, the rails are laid only a little more than half the height above the water--226, as compared with 420 feet. One early difficulty was the establishment of communication with the opposite bank, to avoid a long detour of about ten miles in order to cross the river. First, in order to bring the camps perched on each cliff closer together, a telephone wire was thrown across the ravine. This frail connection was completed in an ingenious manner. A thin string was tied to the stick of a rocket which was fired across the gorge. The opposite party secured the stick and end of the stout twine, and by its means hauled across a thicker length of string, which in turn was followed by one still stouter, with which the telephone wire was hauled across. In this way the opposite camps were brought as closely into touch with one another as if they were side by side on the same bank. Previously, attempts had been made to fly a string across by means of a kite, but the upward rush of eddying air from the vortex of the water caused the kite to become the sport of the wind and to play sorry pranks, without gaining the opposite bank. The complete success of the rocket caused a similar cycle of operations to be repeated, only in this case, instead of hauling a telephone wire across the gorge, a marked wire was handled, the idea being to measure accurately the width of the gap, a spring balance being introduced at one end to compute the extent of the “sag” of the wire for the purposes of calculations. The result of these investigations served to countercheck the surveys, which were found to be strikingly correct, and the design of the bridge was taken in hand immediately by Mr. G. A. Hobson.