The Smoke That Thunders

In November 1855, Scottish missionary David Livingstone paddled a canoe down the Zambezi River in southern Africa. He had heard the indigenous Kololo people speak of Mosi-oa-Tunya — "The Smoke That Thunders." Nothing prepared him for what he found. A curtain of mist rose hundreds of feet into the air. The roar was deafening from a mile away. As he crept to the gorge's edge and peered over, he watched the entire width of the Zambezi — over a mile across — plunge three hundred feet into a chasm so deep the water seemed to vanish into the earth itself.…