Again we were delighted with the calm beauty of that river scene, and found it difficult to decide when it was most beautiful—­whether the morning light best gilded its glories or whether the evening lent additional calm.  We passed island after island in bewildering succession.  Away towards the drift three huge black masses were splashing in the water, which we easily made out to be hippopotami taking their evening bath, and as we glided along a sleepy crocodile slipped back into the water from a muddy eminence where it had been basking in the sun.  Then our canoe ran into a creek where leaves and ferns grew in delightful confusion, and we landed in soft marshy ground just as the sun was sinking like a red ball into the river, and giving way to the sovereignty of a glorious full moon, which soon tinged everything with a silver light, making glades of palms look delightfully romantic.

Civilization has since found its way to Livingstone.  Engines are whistling and trains are rumbling where then the only tracks were made by the huge hippos and the shy buck, but they can never efface the grandeur of the river in its size and calmness; the incomparable magnificence of the cataract itself; the rainbow, which one cannot see without retaining a lasting impression of its beauty; and, lastly, that cloud of white spray, seemingly a sentinel to watch over the strength and might of the huge river, for so many ages undiscovered.

Many who knew the Falls in their pristine solitude have gladly welcomed there the advent of twentieth-century developments, of sign-posts, of advertisements, of seats, of daily posts and papers; but others, some of the older pioneers, still, perchance, give a passing sigh for the days when they paddled about the river in a leaky canoe, and letters and telegrams were not events of everyday occurrence.

In spite of the railway constructed since our visit, few people, comparatively, have been to North-Western Rhodesia, and yet it is a country of over 400,000 square miles.  It was in October, 1897, that the then administrator of the country,[47] with five policemen, crossed the Zambesi and declared the territory to be under the protection of Her Late Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria.  For many years previously the natives, who are not of a particularly warlike disposition, had been decimated, and the country laid waste, by the fierce Matabele, who were in the habit of making periodical raids into this fair land, and of killing the old men and the young warriors, who made but a slight resistance; of annexing the attractive ladies as wives and the fat cattle as prized booty, and then of retreating again south of the mighty river without fear of reprisals.  For this reason there was, in 1903, a very meagre population for many hundreds of miles north of the Zambesi in this direction; and of cattle, for which there is pasture in abundance, there was hardly one to be seen.  One has to travel much farther north and west to find the densely populated valleys, whose inhabitants own Lewanika, Chief of the Barotse, as their ruler, who look to the great white British King as their protector, and to the Chartered Company as the immediate purveyor of their wants.