gesture, feature, and voice. And Frank, my
amiable and trusty Frank, was neither last nor
least in his professions of love and sympathy
and gratitude to Him who had saved us from
a watery grave.
The land party then returned with Frank to
remove the goods to our new camp, and by
night my tent was jpitched within a hundred
yards of the cataract mouth of the Nkenke. We
had four cataracts in view of us: the great river
which emptied itself into the bay-like expanse
from the last line of the Lady Alice Rapids;
two miles below, the river fell again, in a foamy
line of waves; from the tall cliff south of us
tumbled a river 400 feet into the great river;
and on our right, 100 yards off, the Nkenke
rushed down steeply like an enormous cascade
from the height of 1000 feet. The noise of the
Nkenke torrent resembled the roar of an express
train over an iron bridge; that of Cataract
River, taking its 400-feet leap from the cliffs,
was like the rumble of distant thunder; the “ Lady
Alice’s ” last line of breakers, and its fuming
and fretting flanks, was heard only as the swash
of waves against a ship’s prow when driven by
a spanking breeze against a cross sea; while the
cataract below lent its dull boom to swell the
chorus of angry and falling rivers, which filled
our ears with their terrific uproar.
Very different was this scene of towering cliffs
,April fi 1877-1 FOUR c a t a r a c t s in v iew o f u s . 87
[pikenke R. Bay. J
and lofty mountain walls, which daily discharged
the falling streams from the vast uplands above
and buried us withiii the deafening chasm, to
that glassy flow of the Livingstone by the black
eerie forests of Usongora Meno and Kasera, and
through the upper lands of the cannibal Wenya,
where a single tremulous wave was a rarity
We now, surrounded by the daily terrors and
hope-killing shocks of these apparently endless
cataracts, and the loud boom of their baleful
fury, remembered, with regretful hearts, the
Sabbath stillness and dreamy serenity of t ose
days. Beautiful was it then to glide among the
lazy creeks of the spicy And palm-growing isles,
where the broad-leafed Amomum vied m greenness
with the drooping fronds of the Phrymum
where the myrrh and bdellium shrubs exhaled
their fragrance side by side with the wild cassia,
where the capsicum with its red-hot berries rose
in embowering masses, and the Ipomcea’s purple
buds gemmed With colour the tall stem of some
sturdy tree. Environed by] most dismal prospects,
for ever dinned by terrific sound, at all
points confronted by the most hopeless outlook,
we think that an Eden which we have left behind,
and this a watery hell wherein we now
Though our involuntary descent of the Lady
Alice Rapids from Gamfwe’s Bay to Nkenke
River Bay— a distance of three m i l e s — occupied