Again Livingstone sets out on his weary way, untrodden by white man's foot, to pass through unknown tribes, whose savage temper might give him his quietus at any turn of the road. There were various routes to the sea open to him. He chose the route along the Zambesi--though the the most difficult, and through hostile tribes--because it seemed the most likely to answer his desire to find a commercial highway to the coast. Not far to the east of Linyanti, he beheld for the first time those wonderful falls of which he had only heard before, giving an English name to them,--the first he had ever given in all his African journeys,--the Victoria Falls. We have seen how genuine his respect was for his Sovereign, and it was doubtless a real though quiet pleasure to connect her name with the grandest natural phenomenon in Africa, This is one of the discoveries[43] that have taken most hold on the popular imagination, for the Victoria Falls are like a second Niagara, but grander and more astonishing; but except as illustrating his views of the structure of Africa, and the distribution of its waters, it had not much influence, and led to no very remarkable results. Right across the channel of the river was a deep fissure only eighty feet wide, into which the whole volume of the river, a thousand yards broad, tumbled to the depth of a hundred feet[44], the fissure being continued in zigzag form for thirty miles, so that the stream had to change its course from right to left and left to right, and went through the hills boiling and roaring, sending up columns of steam, formed by the compression of the water falling into its narrow wedge-shaped receptacle.
[Footnote 43: Virtually a discovery, though marked in an old map.]
[Footnote 44: Afterward ascertained by him to be 1800 yards and 820 feet respectively.]
A discovery as to the structure of the country, long believed in by him, but now fully verified, was of much more practical importance. It had been ascertained by him that skirting the central hollow there were two longitudinal ridges extremely favorable for settlements, both for missions and merchandise. We shall hear much of this soon.
Slowly but steadily the eastward tramp is continued, often over ground which was far from favorable for walking exercise. "Pedestrianism," said Livingstone, "may be all very well for those whose obesity requires much exercise; but for one who was becoming as thin as a lath through the constant perspiration caused by marching day after day in the hot sun, the only good I saw in it was that it gave an honest sort of a man a vivid idea of the tread-mill."
When Livingstone came to England, and was writing books, his tendency was rather to get stout than thin; and the disgust with which he spoke then of the "beastly fat" seemed to show that if for nothing else than to get rid of it he would have been glad to be on the tread-mill again. In one of his letters to Mr. Maclear he thus speaks of a part of this journey: "It was not likely that I should know our course well, for the country there is covered with shingle and gravel, bushes, trees, and grass, and we were without path. Skulking out of the way of villages where we were expected to pay after the purse was empty, it was excessively hot and steamy; the eyes had to be always fixed on the ground to avoid being tripped."
In the course of this journey he had even more exciting escapades among hostile tribes than those which he had encountered on the way to Loanda. His serious anxieties began when he passed beyond the tribes that owned the sovereignty of Sekelétu. At the union of the rivers Loangwa and Zambesi, the suspicious feeling regarding him reached a climax, and he could only avoid the threatened doom of the Bazimka (_i.e._ Bastard Portuguese) who had formerly incurred the wrath of the chief, by showing his bosom, arms, and hair, and asking if the Bazimka were like that. Livingstone felt that there was danger in the air. In fact, he never seemed in more imminent peril: