Murchison Falls is the place in northern Uganda where the Victoria Nile, a hundred metres wide a moment earlier, is wrung through a cleft barely seven metres across and thrown 43 metres down. A short, steep trail takes you to the lip of that gap. You stand at the edge in rising spray with the rock trembling under your feet as the whole river goes past. Late in the day the low sun catches the permanent cloud of spray, turns it gold and lays rainbows across the gorge. The other approach is from below. The afternoon launch leaves Paraa and pushes seventeen kilometres upriver, past pods of hippos and crocodiles sprawled on the mud, until the cataract fills the bow. The engine is cut under the churn, and the force coming off the water hits you in the face.
North of the river the park opens into borassus savanna. Jeeps cross it at dawn, when the palms stand over herds of Uganda kob and Jackson's hartebeest and the low light is the hour the lion prides are easiest to catch on the move. The tall, pale-legged giraffes among them are Rothschild's, one of the rarest in Africa, unmarked below the knee as though wearing stockings. Roughly three-quarters of all the ones left alive live in and around this park. Their numbers here fell to a few hundred, and part of the recovery came from ferrying animals across the Nile to restock the southern bank. In 1954 Ernest Hemingway survived two plane crashes near these falls in two days, walked out of the bush and later read his own obituaries in the papers. The river is not finished with the rock either. In the floods of 1962 it burst a fresh channel beside the main cataract, and the new fall was named Uhuru, freedom, for the year Uganda became independent. In high water the two thunder side by side, and the younger one has been there exactly as long as the country's freedom.