"Itsi of Ntamo had informed us there were only three cataracts, which he called the 'Child,' the 'Mother,' and the 'Father.' The 'Child' was a two hundred yards' stretch of broken water; and the 'Mother,' consisting of half a mile of dangerous rapids, we had succeeded in passing, and had pushed beyond it by crossing the upper branch of the Gordon-Bennett, which was an impetuous stream, seventy-five yards wide, with big cataracts of its own higher up. But the 'Father' is the wildest stretch of river that I have ever seen. Take a strip of sea blown over by a hurricane, four miles in length and half a mile in breadth, and a pretty accurate conception of its leaping waves may be obtained. Some of the troughs were one hundred yards in length, and from one to the other the mad river plunged. There was first a rush down into the bottom of an immense trough, and then, by its sheer force, the enormous volume would lift itself upward steeply until, gathering itself into a ridge, it suddenly hurled itself twenty or thirty feet straight upward, before rolling down into another trough. If I looked up or down along this angry scene, every interval of fifty or one hundred yards of it was marked by wave-towers--their collapse into foam and spray, the mad clash of watery hills, bounding mounds, and heaving billows, while the base of either bank, consisting of a long line of piled boulders of massive size, was buried in the tempestuous surf. The roar was tremendous and deafening. I can only compare it to the thunder of an express train through a rock tunnel. To speak to my neighbor, I had to bawl in his ear.
"The most powerful ocean steamer, going at full speed on this portion of the river, would be as helpless as a cockle-boat. I attempted three times, by watching some tree floated down from above, to ascertain the rate of the wild current by observing the time it occupied in passing between two given points, from which I estimate it to be about thirty miles an hour!
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE RIGHT BRANCH, FIRST CATARACT, OF THE LIVINGSTONE FALLS, FROM FOUR MILES BELOW JUMBA ISLAND.]
"On the 17th, after cutting brushwood and laying it over a path of eight hundred yards in length, we crossed from the upper branch of the Gordon-Bennett to the lower branch, which was of equal breadth, but twenty feet below it. This enabled us the next day to float down to the confluence of the lower branch with the Livingstone. We could do no more on this day; the people were fainting from lack of food.