The African Queen | Murchison Falls — the gap that makes the Nile look impossible

The Victoria Nile arrives at Murchison Falls a hundred metres wide and leaves through a gap you could throw a stone across. Roughly seven metres of rock takes the entire river and drops it some forty-three metres into the gorge. You hear it a long time before you see it, and standing on the rock above the lip, the spray comes back up at you warm.

It was renamed Kabalega Falls in the 1970s. Most people still say Murchison. It is the anchor of Murchison Falls National Park, and it is the reason the water downstream behaves the way it does in the film — fast, brown, hemmed in, plainly capable of killing you. Huston's Uganda unit worked this river in 1951, and the menace the picture needed did not have to be manufactured.

The park launch runs upstream from Paraa and stops in the boiling water below the falls; a footpath climbs from there to the top. Do the climb. From the rim, the notion of taking a thirty-foot steam launch down this river stops reading as a plot device and starts reading as a decision you can see the consequences of.

Photo: Murchison Falls, via Wikimedia Commons.