History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene.
The fading light is like a steam iron, smoothing over the corrugations of a landscape wrinkled by the afternoon sun till it dissolves into silhouettes under a canopy of stars… the twilight puts the curtains over the horizon and the diurnals pass on the baton to the nocturnals… that is also the time when water turns from sight to sound… the foaming white or the (deceptively) leisurely azure panoramas become babbles or burbles, fizzles or murmurs, depending upon how the terrain wishes to explicate itself…
The first view of Victoria Falls we had from the Zambian side was such an exercise in fading light… the façade was mostly barren, bisected by a solitary gush of water tracing an eerie shade of white as dusk set in… the disappointment did not linger long when ‘twas elaborated that the gigantic swathes of water leaping over in a rather suicidal mood lay on the Zimbabwean side, a plume of vapour and droplets inked in the middle of the canvas testifying to the fact…
From here, sans the water (the dry season was drawing to a close though), one could linger and muse upon the scale of the chasm, the interplay of igneous and sedimentary orchestrated by the erosive… churning out a natural wonder as one weaved across the dry, grassy ridge, trying to fathom and interpret the abyss at the same time… a rather perplexing proposition one could say, gazing across an arid scape that embosoms some of the most dynamic hydrological phenomena on the planet… but the macrocosms seldom need human validation to behave the way they do, and surmising thus we ambled back…
Sunset views around Victoria falls, Zambia, October 2018
