Victoria Falls is a single unbroken curtain of water 1,708 metres wide and more than 100 metres tall. The Zambezi runs shallow and braided across a flat basalt plateau, then meets a crack in that plateau and drops into it all at once. Nothing narrows the river first, so the whole width goes over together. The spray it throws up rises hundreds of metres and can be seen from 50 kilometres away, standing over the bush like a column of smoke. That is what the Kololo people meant by Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders. Some waterfalls are taller and some are wider. None brings the two together on this scale, which is why UNESCO calls it the largest sheet of falling water on Earth.
On the rim the sound reaches you before the sight — a ground-deep thunder you feel in your chest while the water is still hidden behind the trees. A rainforest path runs the length of the Zimbabwean edge, close enough that the spray falls back on you as steady rain. In flood the mist can rise faster than you can see through it. In low water the same cliff stands bare, raw black basalt with the river threading down it in separate streams. Neither state is the falls failing: the Zambezi peaks around April and bottoms out near October, and headlines about the falls drying up misread that cycle. The falls sit on the border, and Zambia and Zimbabwe each guard their own bank as a national park — neither side alone shows you the whole thing.