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WONDERS OF NATURE
Victoria Falls. Nature miracle
Mosi-o-Tunya - "Thundering Smoke" - this is how the hunters of the Batoka tribe called the waterfall on the Zambezi River for a long time. And the Matabele cattle breeders living on the opposite bank gave it another, no less poetic name - Chongue, which in their language means "Place of the Rainbow". The modern name - Victoria - was given to the waterfall in honor of his queen by the first European who saw it in 1855, the Englishman David Livingston. He discovered this natural wonder after two years of hard travel through the savannas and jungles of Central Africa. Three hundred warriors of the local leader Selectu, who accompanied the explorer, did not dare to approach the roaring mass. In their opinion, a formidable deity lived in the abyss under the boiling wall of water, making itself felt with a terrifying growl. Only two of Livingston's most daring companions dared to board a canoe with him and swim to an island located on the crest of a waterfall. But let's leave the word to the traveler himself: "Before our eyes appeared huge columns" steam "rising upwards five or six miles from us. "Steam" rose in five columns and, deviating in the direction of the wind, looked as if these columns touched a low cliff covered with forest. at such a distance it seemed that at the top the pillars mingled with clouds. Below they were white, and above they became dark like smoke. The whole picture was extremely beautiful. The waterfall is bounded on three sides by cliffs about 100 m high, which are covered with forest.
The oarsmen, after guiding a canoe into the middle part of the stream among whirlpools formed by many protruding stones, took me to an island located in the very middle of the river, not far from the ledge over which the water overflowed. Despite the fact that the waterfall was very close, we could not determine where this huge body of water was going; it seemed that it went into the ground, since the opposite ledge of the crack, at which the water disappeared, was only 27 m from us. At least I could not understand it until I crept fearfully to the very edge and looked down into a huge cleft that stretched from one bank to the other across the entire width of the Zambezi ... Looking into the depths of the crevasse, to the right of the islet, I saw nothing but a thick white cloud, on which at that time there were two bright rainbows. From this cloud a huge jet of "steam" escaped, rose up to 200-300 feet; thickening at the top, the "steam" changed its color, becoming dark as smoke, and went back in a hail of fine spray, which soon left not a single dry thread on us. This downpour falls mainly on the other side of the cleft; a few meters from the edge of the cliff there stand a wall of evergreen trees, the leaves of which are always wet. A modern tourist approaching a waterfall sees almost the same picture as an English explorer a century and a half ago. Thousand-ton masses of water hit the basalt foot of Victoria with such force that the water turns into clouds of spray, flying back in five columnar white clouds, rising hundreds of meters into the sky. They can be seen from a distance of forty kilometers, and almost as far the roar of the waterfall is heard, like continuous thunder. The Zambezi River, overflowing in this place almost two kilometers wide, suddenly stumbles here on a giant crack-fault in the basalts, and a powerful water avalanche falls one hundred and twenty meters down, falling into a narrow abyss with steep walls a hundred meters long, located at right angles to upper channel. The islets divide the entire expanse of Victoria into several separate streams, bearing the names: "Devil's Falls", "Main Falls", "Horseshoe", "Rainbow" and "East Falls". Water jets, reminiscent of arrows flying down with foam endings, are carried away into the abyss and disappear in a cloud of spray. Two magnificent rainbows constantly glow above the waterfall. Shocked by the picture that opened before him, Livingston wrote in his diary: "This spectacle was so beautiful that flying angels must have admired it." The waters of the Zambezi, squeezed by a narrow gorge, boil and bubble like volcanic magma, foam and rage with a wild roar and roar. And under the influence of this fabulous majestic picture, the scientist's pencil turns into the poet's pen, because in the dry language of a scientific report it is impossible to convey the feelings of an eyewitness to this earthly miracle. Here is another excerpt from the description of David Livingstone's journey: “The whole mass of water overflowing the edge of the waterfall, three meters below, turns into a kind of monstrous curtain of snow driven by a snowstorm. Water particles separate from it in the form of comets with streaming tails, until this entire snow avalanche turns into a myriad of small comets rushing in one direction , and each of them leaves a tail of white foam behind its core. Victoria Falls is the only place on Earth where you can see the rarest natural phenomenon - the lunar rainbow. It occurs infrequently - only in those moments when the flood on the Zambezi River coincides with the period of the full moon. And even people who have been here more than once cannot always boast that they saw this night miracle. After all, sometimes 10-15 years pass between the next appearances of the lunar rainbow. Only recently, the photographers of the National Geographic magazine managed to capture it on film for the first time. Alas, the black and white illustrations in our book are powerless to convey its mysterious charm. It’s hard to even say what makes the greatest impression on those who have visited Victoria Falls: the spectacle of a giant river suddenly disappearing into a bottomless pit, the monstrous roar of an avalanche, rainbows in clouds of spray, or the damp splendor of an evergreen forest framing this fantastic picture. Each of the tens of thousands of tourists who annually visit the waterfall takes away something of their own in their memory, something that especially struck him in this most beautiful corner of Africa. Some believe that the most amazing impression arises when observing the white columns of "thundering smoke" in the rays of the sunset, when the fading sun throws a golden stream of rays on the cloud pillars, coloring them gray-yellow, and then it seems that some kind of clouds rise above the water. giant torches. I must say that the Africans treated their waterfall much more carefully than the Americans, who spoiled the landscape of Niagara with ridiculous observation towers. To see Victoria from above, it is enough to walk fifty meters to a huge baobab towering over the green sea of the jungle. Climbing the metal ladder to its top, you can enjoy a bird's-eye view of the waterfall without disturbing the natural harmony. Many travelers are not limited only to the spectacle of the waterfall. No matter how beautiful and formidable the sight of a hundred-meter water wall falling into the abyss, Africa still holds many wonders. And if you go on a trip on a pirogue through the dark waters of the Zambezi, which overflowed above the waterfall, you can see a whole world of mysterious and amazing African nature on the banks and islands of the river: green walls of the jungle descending to the water, bathing hippos and elephants, lurking crocodiles and coming to drink antelope... And thrill-seekers sometimes decide on a desperate and full of risk rafting on inflatable rafts along the lower reaches of the Zambezi, roaring and raging in the gorge under the waterfall. On a twenty-kilometer section of the river, they have to overcome nineteen rapids with waves reaching six meters in height ... The discoverer of the Victoria Falls, a friend and teacher of the indigenous Africans, Dr. Livingston is immortalized here forever. Just a few meters from the Devil's Falls stands a modest monument to a remarkable explorer. And nearby, in the town bearing the name of Livingston, his memorial museum was opened. And yet, the main monument to the great traveler will probably remain what people from all over the world seek here, in the very heart of Africa: the grandiose waterfall he discovered on the Zambezi River. Author: B.Wagner
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