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Chapter 46The Eighth Wonder of the WorldDAS ACHTE WELTWUNDER

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And then, in a further day's railway journey, I travelled to the falls of the Zambesi, now most tastelessly named Victoria Falls, the “eighth wonder of the world”! Three and a half times as broad as Niagara! Is that to be conceived?!

Here, if possible, was still more new country, and in the more than primitive hotel, under glowing corrugated-iron roofs, fantasy prices were demanded. Even so, how much of the primal state had already been spoiled in the seventeen years1 since Livingstone discovered this eighth wonder of the world. That was shown most plainly by the photographs of a photographer who had immigrated there fifteen years before. How thinned today was the number of the hippopotami and other hunters' game! How much more passable the primeval forest had become, how much more approachable the natives! I spent six days here with a one-armed Boer gold-seeker, who had lost that arm at his trade, and a little English beer-brewer from the Orange State. We made excursions together to the various views of the Zambesi fall, and river trips by canoe, with the constant small fear that one of the hippopotami surfacing in numbers along the bank might tip the boat over. But perhaps the hippopotami too have already grown more civilized. That would be the first time that “civilization” came welcome to me!

The Boer told me much of interest from war and life, and that there were two kinds of “Boers,” educated ones and “Doppers2.” Among the latter even the infants were dressed in black, to save washing.

We also saw the tree into which Livingstone had scratched his name.

The Zambesi fall itself is so broad that, standing before the main fall, one sees its ends lose themselves in the haze. I saw it from the “rainwood,” the rain forest, to which the perpetual water-dust gives a fairy-tale luxuriance. Between the trunks the “red lilies” grow close to the ground in their thousands, gigantic fire-flowers like round balls of spikes. With the help of a coolie I dug up some of their bulbs. But sadly they never came up. Nor did a single one of my Cape bulbs. But I still think often of the fire-flowers of the Zambesi. Like thousands of red flames they break out of the luxuriant undergrowth of the “rain forest”; and to that sounded the thunder of the wild waters with overwhelming, raging force. For over an hour I stood before it, with the Boer “prospector.” And we did not feel that the fine water-dust was soaking us to the skin. We had forgotten time and place, and that one of us stood beside the other — we were caught in the elemental spell of these powers.

Such an hour lifts one above all earthly sorrow, all everyday need. But such an hour also kissed the killing longing and the restlessness into my heart, the driving hunt after the equally sublime. — The “Gran Canyon” of the Colorado in Arizona, the fire-lake of Kilaulea on Hawai and the falls of the Zambesi — these are perhaps the most sublime spectacles of the whole world, and I, fortunate one, was permitted to let all three work upon me. How small, compared with this, seem all the privations and hardships suffered for them.