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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42737 ***
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
+  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
+
+
+
+
+     THE CAPE PENINSULA
+
+  [Illustration: CAPE TOWN FROM TABLE BAY]
+
+
+
+
+     THE CAPE
+     PENINSULA
+
+     PEN AND COLOUR SKETCHES
+
+     DESCRIBED BY
+     RÉNÉ JUTA
+
+     PAINTED BY
+     W. WESTHOFEN
+
+
+     LONDON: ADAM & CHARLES BLACK
+     CAPE TOWN: J. C. JUTA & CO.
+     1910
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+
+'Only those who see take off their shoes. The rest sit round and pluck
+blackberries and stain their faces with the natural hue of them.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard
+to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the
+roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly
+traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds
+and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on
+the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with
+eyes to see or twopence worth of imagination to understand with.'
+
+     R. L. STEVENSON.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     CHAPTER                                             PAGE
+
+     I. THE CASTLE                                          1
+
+     II. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SOCIETY AND SLAVERY            15
+
+     III.  IN THE BLUE SHADOW OF TABLE MOUNTAIN            30
+
+     IV. 'PARADISE' AND THE BARNARDS                       46
+
+     V. THE LIESBEEK RIVER                                 53
+
+     VI. THE BOSHEUVEL, OR HEN AND CHICKENS HILL           62
+
+     VII. THE CONSTANTIA VALLEY                            73
+
+     VIII. THE MOUNTAIN                                    78
+
+     IX. ROUND THE LION'S HEAD AND THE VICTORIA ROAD       92
+
+     X. FALSE BAY                                         100
+
+     XI. THE BLUE SHADOW ACROSS THE FLATS                 110
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+     1.   Cape Town from Table Bay (_Frontispiece_)
+                                                           FACING PAGE
+     2.   On the Ramparts of the old Castle (moonlight)              5
+
+     3.   Table Bay from the Kloof Nek                              17
+
+     4.   Blaauwberg and Head of Table Bay                          32
+
+     5.   Tigerberg and Diep River                                  34
+
+     6.   Blue Hydrangeas at Groote Schuur                          41
+
+     7.   The Blue Shadow--View from Rhodes's Monument              45
+
+     8.   The Southern Part of False Bay, with Cape Hangclip        47
+
+     9.   Oak Avenue, Newlands                                      59
+
+     10.  Silver Trees and Wild Geraniums                           62
+
+     11.  Fir Avenue--'Alphen'                                      72
+
+     12.  Constantia Valley and False Bay, with Cape Point          78
+
+     13.  A Sunset on the Lions Head: Effect of South-east Wind     88
+
+     14.  On the Victoria Road, near Oude Kraal                     92
+
+     15.  Camps Bay, on the Victoria Road                           95
+
+     16.  Hout Bay and Hangberg                                     97
+
+     17.  Chapman's Peak and Slang Kop Point from Hout Bay          99
+
+     18.  At Lakeside, looking towards Constantia                  102
+
+     19.  At Lakeside, looking South-East                          103
+
+     20.  On Fish Hoek Beach, Nord Hoek Mountains in
+            Distance                                               105
+
+     21.  Simonstown Mountains, with Cape Point and Roman
+            Rock Lighthouses                                       106
+
+     22.  Table Mountain from Retreat Flats                        110
+
+     23.  Sand Dunes                                               112
+
+     24.  On the Sandhills near Muizenberg                         115
+
+     25.  At the Head of False Bay                                 118
+
+
+
+
+CHARACTERS
+
+
+MARINUS and THE WRITER, two slightly sentimental travellers, in modern
+dress, generally riding-clothes.
+
+_Immortals._
+
+     MYNHEER VAN RIEBEEK, AND ALL THE DUTCH COMMANDERS.
+     CAPTAIN COOK.
+     MARION LE ROUX.
+     MR. AND LADY ANNE BARNARD.
+     OLD MAN VAN DER POOL.
+     THE ENGLISH GOVERNORS.
+     SOME ENGLISH MIDSHIPMEN.
+     MYNHEER VAN RHEENEN, a brewer.
+     MR. BARROW, a naturalist.
+     MONSIEUR LE VAILLANT, a French explorer with a temperament.
+     LIEUTENANT ABRAHAM SCHUT.
+     KOLBÉ, a great liar with a sense of humour.
+     MYNHEER CLOETE, a wealthy farmer,
+
+     And some others.
+
+_Chorus._
+
+Hottentots, Bushmen, Saldanhas, Dutch Soldiers and Sailors, English
+Soldiers and Sailors, Burghers, Slaves, Market-Gardeners, Wine-Makers,
+Fishermen, and ordinary people from 1651 to 1910.
+
+
+
+
+THE CAPE PENINSULA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE CASTLE
+
+
+Under three purple-flowered trees standing in the Castle courtyard,
+one blazing hot morning, we, more sentimentally than travellingly
+inclined, sat and rested while a khaki-clothed Tommy wandered round to
+find a guide to show us over the old Dutch fort. We thanked Heaven for
+his half-heartedness and for some shade. Marinus, fortunately for us
+both, smoked his pipe of peace and of Transvaal tobacco, and I opened
+the Brass Bottle, which, indeed, is no bottle at all, but, as everyone
+not vulgarly inclined knows, a fairy-tale metaphor for one's
+imagination. The barometer registered 97° F. in the shade, which is a
+perfect state of atmosphere for the fumes of the Brass Bottle, in
+which, all mingling with the smoke from Marinus' pipe, the building of
+the Castle began.
+
+The walls dissolved into blue air: the brasswork of the 'Kat,' the
+block of buildings dividing the Castle into two courtyards, melted
+into one small spot of liquid, leaving a dry, dusty, levelled yellow
+plain, with an earthwork wall embodying the spirit of the dykes of the
+Netherlands in its composition--for the green waves of Table Bay
+lapped at its base. It was the second day of January, 1666; under the
+blazing sun three hundred discontented-looking men were digging and
+levelling the hard earth. At the westerly land-points were the
+foundations of two bastions. Suddenly a group of men appeared, looking
+like Rembrandt's 'Night-Watch' come to life, carrying sealed
+parchments and plans, followed by many Madagascar slaves in clean
+white linen tunics not to be renewed for six whole months, this being
+the New Year. The slaves carried bags of food and a long tray made of
+wood, on which were about one hundred small moneybags. One of the
+Night-Watch, who was the Commander Wagenaar, walked up to a long table
+whereon was a white stone; the guns of the old fort, crumbling to
+pieces across the parade-ground, fired. It was noon, and the
+foundation-stone of the Castle was laid. The three hundred weary,
+sweating men raised a feeble cheer, the masons, carpenters, and
+smiths, advancing separately, received from the hands of the 'Fiscal,'
+Chief Magistrate and Attorney-General of the Colony, the gift of the
+General Netherlands East India Company of thirty Rds., or rix-dollars,
+tied up in the small black bags. Then the Company moved across to
+another part of the ground, and the Predikant, the Rev. Joan van
+Arckel, proceeded to lay another stone, followed by the Fiscal, Sieur
+Hendrick Lucas, to whose honour fell the laying of the third great
+corner-stone. Then were the entire three hundred malcontents, as well
+as the soldiers who had also laboured, presented with two oxen, six
+sheep, one hundred fresh-baked wheaten loaves, and eight casks of
+Cape-brewed beer, 'which food and drink, well cooked and well
+prepared,' whispered the Chief Surgeon, Sieur Pieter van Clinckenberg,
+to Lieutenant Abraham Schut, 'let us hope may induce these sluggish
+fellows to be better encouraged and made more willing to work.'
+
+Lieutenant Abraham Schut, to whose duties of supervising the Company's
+stables and the Mounted Guards in the country, and the watch-houses,
+and the supervising of the workings and workers of the vineyards, the
+orchards, and the granary, were also added those of 'keeping an eye'
+on the 'lazy fellows at work in the brick and tile fields,' very
+solemnly stared before him at the 'encouraged' diggers, and wondered
+what reward the General Netherlands East India Company had laid up for
+him.
+
+But the Fiscal was addressing the crowd gathered round the Commander.
+I had missed some of his speech because of these two babbling
+Night-Watchers next me, but I now listened: 'And that it may also
+somewhat be evident that by this continual digging and delving in and
+under the ground, poets have also been found and thrown up, a certain
+amateur this day presents to the Commander the following eight
+verses.' The crowd drew closer to the Fiscal, who continued with the
+amateur's verses:
+
+DEN EERSTEN STEEN VAN 'T NIEUWE CASTEEL GOEDE HOOP HEEFT WAGENAAR
+GELECHT MET HOOP VAN GOEDE HOOP.
+
+_Ampliatie._
+
+     Soo worden voort en voort de rijcken uijtgespreijt,
+     Soo worden al de swart en geluwen gespreijt,
+     Soo doet men uijt den aerd' een steen wall oprechten,
+     Daer't donderend metael seer weijnigh (an ophecten)
+     Voor Hottentoosen waren 't altijts eerde wallen.
+     Nu komt men hier met steen van anderen oock brallen,
+     Dus maeckt men dan een schrik soowel d'Europiaen,
+     Als vor den Aes! Ame! en wilden Africaen,
+     Dus wort beroemt gemaeckt 't geheijligst Christendom,
+     Die zetels stellen in het woeste heijdendom,
+     Wij loven 't Groot Bestier, en zeggen met malcander,
+     Augustus heerschappij, noch winnend' Alexander,
+     Noch Caesars groot beleijd zijn noijt daermee geswaerd,
+     Met 't leggen van een steen op 't eijnde van de Aerd!
+
+THE FIRST STONE OF THE NEW CASTLE GOOD HOPE HAS WAGENAAR LAID WITH
+HOPE OF GOOD HOPE.
+
+     Thus more and more the kingdoms are extended;
+     Thus more and more are black and yellow spread;
+     Thus from the ground a wall of stone is raised,
+     On which the thundering brass can no impression make.
+     For Hottentoos the walls were always earthen,
+     But now we come with stone to boast before all men,
+     And terrify not only Europeans, but also
+     Asians, Americans, and savage Africans.
+     Thus holy Christendom is glorified;
+     Establishing its seats amidst the savage heathen.
+     We praise the Great Director, and say with one another:
+     'Augustus's dominion, nor conquering Alexander,
+     Nor Cæsar's mighty genius, has ever had the glory
+     To lay a corner-stone at earth's extremest end!'
+
+  [Illustration: ON THE RAMPARTS OF THE OLD CASTLE (MOONLIGHT)]
+
+Lieutenant Abraham Schut came towards me; no, it was not this
+wonderful Abraham, though he wore a uniform--the cheering of the crowd
+still rung in my ears. 'Who wrote it?' I said. 'Wrote what?' The
+subaltern stared at me. 'Built it, I suppose you mean,' he smiled. 'Oh
+yes, built, of course, of course,' I muttered, hotter than ever.
+Marinus' pipe had burnt out, and the officer who stood before us wore
+khaki.
+
+With the last words of the quaint Dutch poem ringing in my ears, we
+followed our guide across the courtyard into an arched white doorway.
+The old entrance, the sea entrance to the Castle, was blocked up,
+because on the other side runs the Cape Government Railway, with all
+its paraphernalia of tin walls, engine-rooms, dirty, ugly workshops,
+gasometers, coal-heaps, all making up the foreshore scenery of Table
+Bay, and delighting the eyes of the workers and drones who are daily
+hurried (_sic_) along like 'animated packages in a rabbit hutch.'[1]
+
+In the plaster ceiling of this archway is such a charming miniature
+plan, in raised stucco, of the Castle buildings. From here we climbed
+some stone steps and came on to the ramparts, called after the ships
+that first brought Company rule to the Cape--the _Reiger_, the
+_Walvis_, the _Dromedaris_. We climbed up stone stairs, and in white
+stucco, in the wall, were the Company's arms--the big galleon in full
+sail. We passed the cells--the one used by Cetewayo, the rebellious
+Chief of the Zulus, the 'Children of Heaven,' had a special little
+fireplace sunk into the wall--walked along wonderfully neat, bricked
+ramparts past the Guard Tower, and climbed down more steps into the
+courtyard.
+
+We rambled through the quarters of the old Governors. Everything is
+groaning under heavy military paint--teak doors, beautiful brass
+fittings and beamed ceilings--and about a mile away, shut up in a
+small ugly museum room, are the Rightful Inhabitants--the proper
+belongings of these long rooms: the oak tables, the big chairs, which
+once held the old Dutch Governors, the glass they used, the huge
+silver spittoons, their swords, the flowered panniers of their wives'
+dresses, fire-irons, brasses, china, the old flags, someone's
+sedan-chair--all bundled together in grotesque array. The teak-beamed
+rooms in the Castle would make a better setting than the little room
+in the museum.
+
+'Marinus,' I said, 'isn't it awful--this horrible clean paint and
+these little tin sheds in the old garden? Oh, Marinus, _do_ let us
+scrape this tiny bit of latch, just to peep at the lovely brass
+beneath! And let us pretend we are putting back the old cupboards, and
+coffers, and china, and let us burn all that'--with my eye on sheets
+of neat military maps and deal tables. But Marinus, with the fear of
+God and of the King, pushed me rudely past a Georgian fireplace into a
+large room with a big open chimney. Over the grate, let into the wood,
+I saw the most ridiculous old painting--like a piece of ancient
+sampler in paint instead of silk--an absurd tree with an impossible
+bird on a bough, and beneath it a terraced wall with some animals like
+peacocks, with the _paysage_ background _à la_ Noah's ark, but
+slightly less accurate. 'There is a superstitious story about that
+picture,' said Marinus. 'They say some treasure was hidden in the
+thick wooden screen over the chimney, and the picture was gummed over
+it. The story goes that whoever should touch this picture, or attempt
+to remove it, would die shortly afterwards. It may be that the curse,
+or a bit of it, landed on the old, stamped brass screen which was
+taken to Groote Schuur, shortly before Rhodes died. But no one would
+want this horror, would they?' This story made me love the chintz
+picture, and, after all, the colours were good; it was antique; it
+was old; and there was treasure behind it!
+
+Above this room are Anne Barnard's apartments, where she came to live
+when the Secretary of State, Melville, gave 'the prettiest appointment
+in the world for any young fellow'--the Secretaryship to the Governor
+of the Cape--to Lady Anne's husband in 1797. She had to write Melville
+several letters before she got this appointment. 'To pay me all you
+have owed and still owe me, you _never can_--but what you can you
+should do, and you have got before you the pleasure of obliging me,'
+she wrote. There is stuff for a novel in this sentence. The last
+appeal, 'You owe me some happiness, in truth you do,' brought this
+pretty appointment with a salary of £3,500 a year.
+
+I looked out of a window of her room, which opened on to a small
+balcony, and conjured up the procession she saw the day after she
+landed--the taking of the oath of allegiance to King George III., the
+crowd trooping in through the yellow-bricked gateway, clattering over
+the cobble-stones, every man with his hat off (an old Dutch regulation
+on entering the Castle on a public occasion). 'Well-fed, rosy-cheeked
+men, well-powdered and dressed in black! "Boers" from the country,
+farmers and settlers, in blue cloth jackets and trousers and very
+large flat hats, with a Hottentot slave slinking behind, each carrying
+his master's umbrella, a red handkerchief round his head, and a piece
+of leather round his waist comprising his toilette.'
+
+I heard voices under the arch-gateway leading to the inner courtyard;
+the subaltern had another party in tow, and his nice voice was very
+clear: 'Oh yes, wonderful people, these old Dutch Johnnies; everything
+they built lasts so well. Now look at this old sundial; same old
+thing! there it is, _keeping the right time still--what_?'
+
+I laughed quite loudly, and the party looked up, but I had flown back
+into Anne's room, which is haunted, so perhaps they thought it was the
+ghost--same old ghost! a good lusty ghost--what?
+
+I met Marinus in the inner court with a man carrying a lantern and
+some huge keys--our guide to the magazine and armoury, which might
+have been the crypt of some old European monastery, with what seemed
+to be miles of white arches, arches with broad brass shutters over the
+windows, covered with red or grey army paint.
+
+The garden of this second courtyard exists no longer, though the man
+with the lantern and the keys told us he remembered it--a pond with
+bamboos and trees. Beyond the moat on the mountain side, on a low
+level, is a disused Tennis court, a real court for the 'Jeu de Paume'
+of the seventeenth century, with hard cement walls and cement floor.
+
+Although Governor Borghorst, with his entire family, amused
+themselves by carrying the earth in baskets from the ditch which was
+to form the moat, the real work of the Castle was carried out from old
+plans of Vauban by Isbrand Goski, in a great hurry, with the shadows
+of French cannon and French flags disturbing his dreams. The shadows
+proved worthless phantoms, for peace was declared before the fort was
+ready. Later on, Sir James Craig, filled with zeal for the defence of
+this ultra-important outpost, which had come, with some slight
+misunderstanding, into the hands of England, caused more blockhouses
+to be built along the slopes of the Devil's Peak, realizing the
+ridiculous position of the Castle for defence purposes. Fort Knokke
+was connected with the Castle by a long, low, fortified wall, called
+the 'Sea Lines.' Beyond the Castle stood the 'Rogge Bay,' the
+'Amsterdam,' and the 'Chavonnes' batteries, while at the water edge of
+the old Downs--now called Green Point Common--stood the little
+'Mouille' battery. The land on which, unfortunately, the Amsterdam
+battery was built has become a valuable adjunct of the docks, and it
+now stands a scarred, maimed thing with its sea-wall lying in débris.
+A sad spectacle, like a deserted beehive, with all its cells and
+secrets exposed to the dock world--half solid rock, half small, yellow
+Dutch brick.
+
+It is Wednesday morning in present Cape Town, we have left the
+Castle, wept over the Amsterdam battery, and marched up Adderley
+Street.
+
+At the top of Adderley Street is the old Slave Lodge, now used for
+Government Offices and the Supreme Court, low and white, with cobbled
+courtyard and thick walls. About here, in the old days, began the
+Government Gardens or 'Company's' Gardens, a long oak avenue running
+through them. At the time of the Cession of the Cape to the English,
+the Gardens had been very much neglected. Lord Macartney appropriated
+a large slice for the rearing of curious and rare plants (the
+Botanical Gardens).
+
+Government House, on the left, was originally built as a pleasure
+pavilion or overflow guesthouse during the 'Company's' régime. One or
+two of the later Dutch Governors used it as their residence, and
+during the short English rule in 1797 Lord Macartney and his
+successor, Sir George Younge, ceased to use the large suite of rooms
+in the old Castle. Poor Lord Macartney, because of his gout, found the
+narrow, steep stairs in the Gardens House a great trial. He hopped up
+the stairs like a parrot to its perch, says one of his staff in a
+private letter; but Sir George Younge, fresh from Holyrood, rebuilt
+the stairs and kitchens and the high wall round a part of the garden.
+For the occasion the avenue was shut to the public, which nearly
+caused a revolution. It has seen much, this low, yellow 'Pavilion in
+the Gardens.' It has sheltered French, English, and Dutch: famous for
+its ancient hospitality, its big white ball-room saw our
+great-grandmothers, in white muslin and cashmere shawls, dancing under
+the tallow candles: every tree in the garden hung with lights: Van
+Rheenen and Mostaert ladies dancing away, while their husbands and
+fathers and mothers stood outside and cursed their partners: but one
+must dance, no matter what one's politics may be.
+
+Hanging on the walls of the present day Government House are portraits
+of the Past-Governors--Milner with the thinking eyes, dignified Lord
+Loch, Rosmead, Grey, Bartle Frere benignly gazing. Skip some history,
+and you have Somerset, stern and disliked; 'Davie' Baird, full of good
+round oaths, in 'Raeburn' red; Sir Harry Smith of the perfect profile,
+too short for the greatness of his spirit. Marinus grows sentimental
+before this portrait, because of Juanita, Lady Smith, her beauty, and
+her bravery. 'But she was fat'--this from me. Marinus looks
+compassionately on such doubtful tactics. 'She was not fat when he
+found her in that sacked Spanish town; she was not fat when he sent
+her that long ride to return the looted silver candlesticks; she was
+not fat when she rode with him into danger during the Kaffir
+wars--wonderful energetic woman!' 'Sir Harry was very short,'
+continued Marinus, whose methods are quite unoriginal. 'But his
+dignity, and his beautiful nose!' I said; 'it reminds me of that story
+told of Napoleon, who tried and failed, through being too short, to
+reach a certain book from a shelf. A tall Marshal came to his aid,
+and, looking down at the little Emperor, said: "Ah, sire, je suis plus
+grand que vous." "Pas du tout, vous êtes plus long," said the
+Emperor.'
+
+Then there is the portrait of Macartney, looking straight across the
+room at old Dutch Rhenius in wig and satins, whose shrewd, amused eyes
+follow one about the room. I think Rhenius' dinner-parties were
+probably amusing.
+
+There are no other portraits of Dutch Governors; none of those who
+followed in such quick succession just before the first British
+occupation.
+
+One of these, De Chavonnes, ruled with pomp and circumstance. There is
+an amusing story set down in the 1720 _Journal_ wherein the Governor
+maintained his dignity in the face of a humorous situation.
+
+De Chavonnes was at the Castle, and into Table Bay sailed the English
+ship, the _Marlborough_. She failed to salute the Castle on arrival.
+Much bustle and fuss--such an insult cannot be passed over. The
+Wharf-master, Cornelius Volk, is ordered to proceed on board and
+inform the captain that no one will be allowed to land before the
+usual salute is fired. With more haste arrives an English midshipman,
+very pink and well-mannered: 'We have on board an elephant, your
+Excellency, and are afraid the firing might frighten him.' His
+Excellency and the Wharf-master and the chief merchant, Jan de la
+Fontaine, together with the members of the Council and officers of the
+garrison, stared at the pink-faced middy. De Chavonnes hesitated only
+one minute, which is a long period of time for the middy, who I am
+quite sure had compromising dimples; then came His Excellency's
+answer: 'The excuse is allowed.'
+
+A very dignified finale! Smaller things than elephants have unbalanced
+the scales of peace.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] The Right Hon. J. X. Merriman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SOCIETY AND SLAVERY
+
+
+We walked across the parade-ground, and past the spot where, in my
+dream, I had seen the old Van Riebeek fort crumbling to pieces, with
+its canal and little bridges: now, there is a building called the Post
+Office, and instead of the canal, with its tree-bordered pathways, a
+street called Adderley Street, with shop-windows where the trees
+stood. Even the old Exchange is gone, with its stiff row of trees and
+its chained posts and _kiosque_, before which, in the turbulent days
+of Sir Harry Smith's régime, all Cape Town, English, Dutch, Malay, in
+stock, and crinoline, and turban, with one united voice roared against
+the Imperial Government's decree, which was to turn the Peninsula into
+a dumping-ground for convicts. Crinoline, stock, and turban kept the
+half-starved convict ships with their unwelcome freight for five
+months at anchor in Simon's Bay. Sir Harry, with an eye of sympathy on
+the mob, and the other eye of duty on the starving convict ships,
+ordered food to be sent, offered famine prices: no one moved. A few
+judicious civil servants, with both eyes on the main chance, smuggled
+a small supply on board. But the crowd in front of the old Exchange
+won the day, and Australia profited instead.
+
+At the end of the eighteenth century a young lady described the Cape
+and its inhabitants in a few words: 'Di menschen zyn moei dik en vet,
+di huizen moei wit en groen' (The people are very fat and plump; the
+houses are pretty white and green).
+
+Up Strand Street, which was the 'Beach Street,' lived all the high in
+the land, the Koopmans, or merchants--'a title,' says an old writer,
+'that conferred rank at the Cape to which the military even aspired.'
+There they lived, in flat-roofed, high-stoeped houses with teak doors
+and small-paned glass windows, facing the sea; the men smoking,
+drinking and selling; the women eating, dressing and dancing. Not a
+decent school in the town, not a sign of a library, only a theatre
+whose productions bored them intolerably: 'Ach, foei toch, Mijnheer
+Cook,' says the lady with the smallest feet in all Kaapstad to the
+famous sailor Cook, who was the guest of her father, Mijnheer Le Roux,
+'go to the theatre? to listen for three hours to a conversation?' Cook
+gave in, and, instead, was carried off in a big 'carosse,'[2] with a
+Malay coachman in large reed hat over his turban, pointed and with
+flowing ribbons at the side, to the Avenue in the Company's
+Gardens, a modest Vauxhall, and then on to one of the monthly dances
+given in the Castle by the Governor Van Plettenberg.
+
+  [Illustration: TABLE BAY FROM THE KLOOF NEK]
+
+Dancing was the great form of exercise. 'The ladies of the Cape are
+pretty and well dressed,' says the French traveller Le Vaillant,
+visiting the Cape about this time--1772. He expressed great surprise
+at the way they dressed: 'With as much attention to the minutiæ of
+dress as the ladies of France, with neither their manners nor their
+graces.' How could they have manners and graces? With the adaptability
+which amounts to genius, which the women of newly-arisen cosmopolitan
+nations possess as Fate's compensation for depriving them of the
+birthright of history, tradition, and ancient habitation, they
+imitated the manners and fashions of the passing passengers resting a
+few days at the Cape on their way to India. Those belonging to the
+better class all played on the harpsichord and sang; they had
+generally a good knowledge of French, and often of English; were
+experts with the needle, making all kinds of lace, 'knotting' and
+tambour work; and they usually made up their own dresses.
+
+The men and youths, who never mixed with the English or foreign
+visitors, were entirely different: phlegmatic and dull, badly dressed
+and badly mannered. Anne Barnard, writing Cape gossip to London, has
+many stories to tell of pretty Cape ladies running off with
+Englishmen or Frenchmen. The thanksgiving sigh of one worthy 'Koopman'
+is conclusive: 'Grace à Dieu, ma femme est bien laide!'
+
+However, we must return to the house of Le Roux in the Strand Street.
+It is the day after the fête in the Avenue and the Governor's ball. At
+an old French bureau, with metal inlays, praising Monsieur Buhl in
+every beautiful line, this gallant Captain Cook wrote in his _Journal_
+while the pretty little 'Foei toch,' with sighs of neglect, sat
+playing the spinet in a corner of vantage. They changed places
+presently--he would dictate and she should write. Two minutes passed,
+and Cook got up and looked over her shoulder. She had written,
+atrociously, a funny little French verse and signed it:
+
+     'Marion pleurt,
+     Marion rit,
+     Marion veut, qu'on la marie.
+                             'MARION.'
+
+Cook smiled and bowed. 'Me dear, you have the most adorable foot in
+the world, but I dare say little for your hand.' Very witty of him,
+but of course she wrote badly; there were no schools, only ill-paid
+writing masters. The parsons, all well paid by the Government, would
+not condescend to such a worthless occupation.
+
+So Cook wrote his _Journal_ himself, in large, scrawling writing,
+with old-fashioned _s_'s, while his two ships, the _Resolution_ and
+the _Adventure_, anchored by stout chains instead of cables in this
+Bay of Storms, lay waiting for a good wind to sail away round the
+world. And Marion sang from her corner at the spinet:
+
+               'Marions ci,
+               Marions ça,
+     Mais jamais, jamais marions là.'
+
+Cook writes:
+
+                                 'THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE,
+                                    '_Monday, November 2, 1772_.
+
+     'The Cape of Good Hope, in Caffraria, or the Country of the
+     Hottentots, is the most southern promontory of Africa.
+
+     'It is very mountainous.
+
+     'The Table Mountain is of a great height (_sic_), and the
+     top of it is always covered with a cap of clouds before a
+     storm. There are no harbours, though there is a sea-coast
+     of a thousand miles. When Commodore Byron touched at the
+     Cape he was obliged to work into Table Bay with his top
+     sails close reefed. Indeed, the Cape is scarce ever free
+     from storms a week together; the winds blow hard and on
+     every side from the vast southern ocean, and the waves of
+     the sea rise to a height never seen or experienced in any
+     part of Europe. The Bay of Biscay, turbulent as it is, has
+     no billows that mount like those on this extensive ocean;
+     the stoutest vessels are tossed and almost lifted to the
+     skies. A number of rich ships have perished on this coast;
+     the Dutch have lost whole fleets even at anchor before the
+     Town.
+
+     'The climate is very healthy, the country is fine, and it
+     abounds with refreshments of every kind. The Company's
+     garden is the most ravishing spot.'
+
+(He read this to Mademoiselle Marion, who had found Mr. Pickersgill,
+his Third Lieutenant, a good second when the gallant Captain, with his
+tongue in his cheek and a wink at Marion, escorted the fat wife of
+Governor Van Plettenberg round the most ravishing Gardens.) The
+Captain went on with his diary:
+
+     'The garden produces all the most delicious fruits of Asia
+     and Europe. It is guarded from the winds and storms by
+     hedges of bay, very thick and high, affording a most
+     refreshing shade in the hottest season. It abounds with
+     peaches, pomegranates, pineapple, bananas, citrons, lemons,
+     oranges, the pears and apples of Europe, all excellent in
+     their kind, and the crimson apple of Japan, appearing
+     through the green leaves, of all the most beautiful. The
+     Dutch have large plantations of almond-trees, and many
+     sorts of camphor-trees, and there is scarce a cottage
+     without a vineyard to it. Their cabbages and cauliflowers
+     weigh from thirty to forty pounds, their potatoes from six
+     to ten, raised from seed brought from Cyprus and Savoy.
+     Their corn is ripe in December, and our Christmas is the
+     time of their harvest. In January they tread out their
+     corn, and in February the farmers carry it to the Company's
+     magazines.
+
+     'They sow every kind of grain but oats. Lions, tigers,
+     leopards, elephants, and the rhinoceros are to be found
+     here; the elephants are very large; their teeth (_sic_)
+     weigh from sixty to one hundred and twenty pounds. The
+     Dutch keep up a body of regular forces, and have a strong
+     garrison at the Cape; they have also a militia, a corps of
+     men in all nations formidable in themselves, most dreadful
+     to an enemy, and, when called out for service, spreading
+     destruction all around them in the heights of their
+     ungovernable fury. They are of so robust a disposition, and
+     so naturally inclined for war, that, like the Devonshire
+     and Northamptonshire champions in England, they are ever
+     ready to solicit employment, even against the principles of
+     their own institution.'
+
+Next day the Governor, the English Consul, the Fiscal, Marion and her
+father, together with a large party, boarded the _Resolution_, to see
+them make fresh water out of salt water; and when they left, and
+before the _Resolution_, firing fifteen guns, and the _Adventure_
+nine, sailed away round the world, Mr. Pickersgill and Marion had
+found time to fall in love. Marion at her spinet that evening shed
+very salt little Dutch tears when she came to the lines, 'Mais jamais,
+jamais marions là.'
+
+There is a charming poem by Ian Colvin which Marinus thinks might be
+inspired by Marion and her Lieutenant.
+
+In the Museum at the top of the old Company's gardens lies a little
+English shoe of surprising smallness--surprising, for not only Anne
+Barnard remarked on the size of the Cape ladies' feet: there is that
+nice story of the enterprising merchant who chartered a large shipload
+of out-sizes in ladies' shoes, and the ladies sent their slaves in the
+dark to buy them!
+
+The poem goes:
+
+     'There's a tiny English shoe
+     Of morocco, cream and blue,
+     Made with all a cobbler's skill
+     By Sam Miller in Cornhill.
+
+     'Many a story, quaint and sweet,
+     Of the lady fair, whose feet
+     Twinkled with a charm divine
+     Beneath her ample crinoline,
+     Making her tortured lovers dream
+     That heaven itself was blue and cream.'
+
+The story tells of how this dainty creature walked down the
+'Heerengracht,' followed by the tortured lovers:
+
+     'Van der Merwe, Jacques Theron,
+     The Captain of the garrison,
+     Petrus de Witt, or Van Breda,
+     Or Cloete of Constantia.
+     And then the Fiscal--fat and old--
+     What matters? he had power and gold,
+     Coffers of dollars, and doubloons,
+     Gold mohurs, pagodas, ducatoons,
+     And in his cupboards stored away
+     The priceless treasures of Cathay.'
+
+Then it tells of how she loved this English sailor, how he left to
+sail to many strange lands, and asked her what she wished to have.
+
+     'And she, although her cheeks were wet,
+     Was in a moment all coquette:
+     "Your English fashions would, I fear,
+     But ill become my homely sphere;
+     Besides, you know not how to choose--
+     Bring me instead a pair of shoes."'
+
+So the English lover sailed away, and the Fiscal became a menace to
+the poor little cream and blue 'Jonge Vrouw,' and the wedding-day
+arrived:
+
+     'From Signal Hill to Witteboom,
+     From Kirstenbosch to Roodebloem,
+     With cannon, bugle, bell and horn,
+     They ushered in the wedding morn.'
+
+But the English lover and the shoes arrived just in time; the bride
+was missing; the wedding-party and the storming Fiscal rushed down to
+the sea-shore--'a ship in a cloud of sail was riding out of the Bay in
+a favouring gale.'
+
+     'They heard above the ocean's swell
+     Ring faint and clear a wedding bell;
+     And where the boat put off, they found
+     A tiny shoe upon the ground.'
+
+              'Marions ci,
+              Marions ça,
+        Et jamais, jamais marions là.'
+
+A charming idyll to amuse us as we climbed up the hill to Riebeek
+Square, where the flat-roofed houses and the old Slave-Market with a
+few wind-twisted pines have so much of the 'old order' in their
+keeping.
+
+Behind the square were the old brickfields, where poor Lieutenant
+Schut's duties lay. The Slave-House stands in the middle of the
+square.
+
+This energetic young man disappears from the pages of the _Journals_
+and presumably from society.
+
+                                            '_August 1, 1668._
+
+     'Lieutenant Schut is expelled from the Council, because he
+     has passed a deed of reclamation to the widow of the late
+     Reverend Wachtendorp for libellous words uttered by him
+     behind her back, and to her injury.
+
+     'The Council should keep itself free from obloquy, and
+     unpolluted.'
+
+Praiseworthy sentiments, but they must have suffered for them. I find
+no mention of another paragon who was able to accept the
+responsibilities imposed upon Schut.
+
+Indiscriminate gossip or libel was most severely punished at the Cape,
+the desire to be free from obloquy not being confined to the Council.
+
+In 1663 Teuntje Bartholomeus, wife of the burgher, Bartholomeus Born,
+is banished for six weeks to Dassen Island for having libelled a
+certain honest woman. A perfect rest-cure! Six weeks on Dassen Island!
+alone with Nature, wind, sea, rock-rabbits, and seals!
+
+There is no official mention of her return from exile.
+
+
+SLAVES.
+
+'For there is no country in the world where slaves are treated with so
+much humanity as at the Cape,' writes Le Vaillant in 1780, but in
+reading through the old day-books of Van Riebeek, Hackius, Borghorst,
+Isbrand Goski, and the Van der Stels, the punishments inflicted on
+slaves might have been inspired by those old, over-praised painters,
+who gloried in an anatomical dissection of a poor wretch whose
+miserable body possessed no anatomy at all. The Mozambique,
+Madagascar, and Malay slaves were keel-hauled; they were tied in sacks
+and thrown into the Bay; they were tortured. Here is the sentence of
+one: 'Bound on a cross, when his right hand shall be cut off, his body
+pinched in six places with red-hot irons, his arms and legs broken to
+pieces, and after that to be impaled alive before the Town House on
+the Square, his dead body afterwards to be thrown on a wheel outside
+the town _at the usual place_, and to be left a prey to the birds of
+the air.' Could any torture of the Inquisition be worse? But these
+tortures were in 1696, years before the enlightened days of Le
+Vaillant. The half-breed slaves of the early days were a source of
+worry to the ruling council; several times in the _Journals_ one may
+come across a case of a freeman or burgher marrying his emancipated
+slave:
+
+     '"Maria of Bengal," a Hindoo woman, set the fashion, and
+     the famous interpretress, Eva, during her extraordinary
+     career of diplomatic and immoral episodes within the walls
+     of the Fort, where she wore garments made by kind Maria van
+     Riebeek, or outside the walls, where she wore the filthy
+     skins of her own people, the Hottentots, beguiled the
+     senior surgeon to such lengths that he was granted
+     permission to marry her. He fortunately was killed during
+     an expedition to Madagascar, but not before he had had
+     sufficient time to regret the beguilings of Eva.'
+
+Many of the slaves were children of convicts sent from Batavia and the
+Malay Settlements. Here is the case of a half-breed girl, which was
+sent to Batavia for judgment:
+
+     'Regarding the half-breed girl, you order that she is to
+     serve the Company until her twenty-second year, when she is
+     to be emancipated on condition that she makes profession of
+     the Christian faith, and, moreover, pays R. 150 for her
+     education. We are well aware that this rule is observed in
+     the case of _slave children having Dutch fathers_, but
+     whether it applies to children of _convict women_ by Dutch
+     fathers, as in the case of this girl, would like to hear
+     from you.'
+
+When Le Vaillant wrote, all these rules had changed, though even he
+talks with some mystery of a runaway slave having received a _slight
+correction_. When slaves landed at the Cape, they cost from a hundred
+and twenty to a hundred and fifty dollars (_i.e._, rix-dollars) each,
+that being about £22 10s. to £27 10s. The negroes from Mozambique and
+those of Madagascar were the best labourers; the Indians were much
+sought after for service in the house and in the town. Malays were the
+most intelligent and the most dangerous. Barrow, in whose days (1798)
+the price of slaves had gone up considerably, tells a story showing
+the revengeful spirit of the Malay. A slave, thinking that he had
+served his master sufficiently long and with great fidelity, and
+having also paid him several sums of money, was tempted to demand his
+liberty. He was met with a refusal. He straightway went and murdered
+his fellow-slave. He was taken up and brought before the Court,
+acknowledged that the slave he had murdered was his friend, but said
+that the best form of revenge he could think of was not to murder his
+master, but to deprive him of a slave worth the value of a thousand
+rix-dollars (_i.e._, £187 10s.) and of another thousand by bringing
+himself to the gallows!
+
+The Creole slaves were sold for a higher price than the others, and
+were often 'acquainted with a trade,' when their price became
+exorbitant. They were clothed properly, but went barefooted. Twenty to
+thirty slaves were generally found in one house. 'That insolent set
+of domestics called _footmen_,' writes the French explorer, 'are not
+to be seen at the Cape; for pride and luxury have not yet introduced
+these idle and contemptible attendants who in Europe line the
+ante-chambers of the rich, and who in their deportment exhibit every
+mark of impertinence!' The abolition of the Rack and Torture was
+responsible for an extraordinary occurrence: the public executioner
+made an application for a pension in lieu of the emoluments he used to
+receive for the breaking of legs and arms; the second hangman upon
+inquiry learnt that not only did the English of this new régime
+abolish the Rack and Torture, but that they were not thinking of
+establishing breaking on the wheel; this was more than he could bear,
+and, fearing starvation, he went and hanged himself! Strange irony of
+fate.
+
+In every family a slave was kept whose sole duty was the gathering of
+wood. It was strictly forbidden to gather any fuel, scrub, or bush on
+the Downs or Flats, so the slave would go out every morning up the
+mountains, and would return at night with two or three small bundles
+of faggots--the produce of six or eight hours' hard labour--swinging
+at the two ends of a bamboo carried across his shoulder. In some
+families more than one slave was kept for this purpose, and this gives
+a very good idea of the scarcity of wood at the Cape as late as 1798.
+From the diaries of that time one gathers that, though wood was only
+used for cooking purposes--as only the kitchen possessed a
+fireplace--yet the cost of fuel for a small household amounted to
+forty or fifty pounds a year.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[2] Barouche.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+IN THE BLUE SHADOW OF TABLE MOUNTAIN
+
+
+The blue shadow of Table Mountain falls straight across the 'Flats,'
+or the sandy isthmus of the Cape Peninsula--a long, intensely blue
+line stretching from one ocean to the other.
+
+In 1653 this shadow meant something more than a beautiful shade; it
+was a boundary-line; it meant safety and shade within its depth, war
+and barbarians beyond.
+
+Along its borders were dotted small forts and watch-houses; there were
+even the beginnings of a canal running parallel with the definite
+shade, to intensify its significance.
+
+The Dutch East India Company's long-suffering and harassed Commander,
+Van Riebeek, with infinite undertaking of dangers and difficulties,
+wild beasts, Hottentots, and quicksands, rode across it, and fixed its
+boundaries as proper limits to the Settlements, which its most
+honourable directors were pleased to call 'Goode Hoop.'
+
+The blue shadow begins on the other side of the Wind Mountain or
+Devil's Peak, and we will go where it leads.
+
+In 1663 there was a narrow road running close up to the mountain
+rather higher up than the present dusty main road. It ran as far as
+Rondebosch, or 'Rond die Bostje,' whose round-wood traditions are
+untraceable, Van Riebeek having given orders that only the outer
+bushes should be preserved as a convenient kraal for cattle. Along
+this narrow road a small ox-cart rumbled every day from the fort in
+Cape Town, dragging home logs of wood from the almost unknown land
+beyond; its driver running momentary risk of meeting in the narrow way
+the lions, tigers, or rhino, that roamed the mountain slopes.
+
+One end of the shadow falls into the sea at Maitland or Paarden
+Island, and covers some stretches of beach, small houses, and railway
+workshops. There the rivers meet--the Diep River from Milnerton, the
+Liesbeek and the Black Rivers from across the Flats. They join and
+form the Salt River, a wide, overflowing stream that is constantly
+flooding the green lands between the sea and the old Trek road to the
+north.
+
+In the old days, this beach between Salt River and Milnerton was the
+setting of tragedies: backed in on the north and east by the
+Blaauwberg Mountains and the Stellenbosch Ranges, and on the
+south-east by the Hottentot's Holland.
+
+From behind the Blaauwberg, or Blueberg, came that long thin stream of
+Saldanhas from the north, lighting their fires among the rushes of the
+Diep River and the Salt Pans near the Tigerberg or Leopard Mountains,
+which are the green, corn-sown hills of Durbanville and Klipheuvel.
+
+They brought with them, past the outpost 'Doornhoop' on the Salt
+River, to the very gates of Van Riebeek's Fort, then standing where
+the railway station now is, cattle and sheep and wonderful stories of
+rich countries to the north and north-east, where kings lived in
+stationary stone houses and had much gold, their wives loaded with
+bracelets and having necklaces of sparkling white stones! The little
+dysentery-stricken settlement, growing thin and determined on a carrot
+and a snack of rhinoceros, opened the gates, bought the scurvy cattle,
+believed the stories, and had visions of reaching the fabulously
+renowned river 'Spirito Sancto.' They dragged their waggons and their
+precious oxen and horses over the scrub and sand-dunes; and now one
+may see the fruits of these brave but small expeditions in carefully
+compiled but imaginative maps and plans, telling of how one or another
+reached the banks of the Orange River and found 'a great desert,' but
+found no great kings, no gold, no cities.
+
+  [Illustration: BLAAUWBERG AND HEAD OF TABLE BAY]
+
+Lying close to the shore are many wrecks, an old order which has
+changed but slowly.
+
+This corner of the bay was a dangerous roadstead before the year 1653.
+
+A scurvy gang of bastard natives called 'Watermen' or 'Beach Rangers,'
+crawling like mammoth cockroaches among the seaweed and wreckage, had
+eked out their monstrous living long before the _Harlem_ dragged her
+anchor and stranded at the mouth of the Salt River.
+
+A grand string of names in the records of these old wrecks; no cheap
+sloops, galleots, or second-rate pirating-hulks, but big, stately
+merchantmen: one, from France, _La Maréchale_, with a Bishop on board
+who is uncommonly like the man who became a Cardinal during the reign
+of 'Le Roi Soleil.' He was on his way to Madagascar with something
+political behind his mad-sounding schemes for church-building (on such
+a sparsely inhabited island) and for personally endowing the buildings
+to the tune of hundreds of thousands; it may be heresy, but there was
+something politically consequent in the extraordinary story of this
+wreck of _La Maréchale_ and the energy of the French seal-fisheries at
+Saldanha Bay.
+
+To continue the rôle of backstairs glory: an English ship--a
+well-known name, _The Mayflower_--on her way from the east with John
+Howard, her captain, got a bad time in the terrible bay, tearing winds
+coming from the 'Wind Mountain' and across from Robben Island.
+
+The clearing of the roadsteads became almost a yearly festival and a
+certain necessity.
+
+So the blue shadow begins by the sea and ends by the sea; but to reach
+the other end will take us in a motor more than thirty minutes; an
+ox-waggon lumbering across sandy dunes and along stony mountain-paths
+took the early settlers something more than a day or two. We did it
+riding, and took something like a month; but one must compromise to
+really enjoy life.
+
+We rode one day along the main road to Rondebosch, where the old
+Commanders would ride out two hundred years ago, to inspect the
+Company's granary, 'Groote Schuur,' and the Company's guesthouse,
+'Rustenburg.'
+
+The Cape Town length of the road has little of interest. 'Roodebloem'
+comes into the list of old homesteads; and down in the swampy green
+fields of Observatory Road, where the clerk life of Cape Town has its
+two acres and a cow, and near the Royal Observatory, lived the
+Company's free miller; and the Liesbeek waters worked his mill. There
+is still an old mill in existence, but probably of later date.
+
+  [Illustration: TIGERBERG AND DIEP RIVER]
+
+In 1658 the Company gave grants of land along the Liesbeek River,
+mostly all along the west side, beginning with the swampy land below
+the Wind Mountain or Devil's Peak, granted to the Commander's
+nephew-in-law, Jan Reyniez, and ending on the south side,
+somewhere in Wynberg, with the lands of Jacob Cloeten of Cologne. The
+burghers, having formed into three companies--one called Vredens
+Company--lying in lands on the wrong side of the river at Rosebank,
+sent in a petition, which was forwarded with all due delay to the
+Commander and Council, who, 'having found, according to the many deeds
+and diagrams, that the land is quite dangerously situated, the owners
+being exposed to the depredations of the Hottentots,' granted new
+lands near the Company's orchard, called 'Rustenburg.'
+
+The conditions laid down by the Company to freemen varied slightly in
+each little colony: there were three along the Blue shadow:
+
+     '1. They might fish in the rivers, but not for sale.
+
+     '2. The Company would _sell_ them at ploughing time a plough
+     and twelve oxen. The ground should be theirs for ever.
+
+     '3. That they should grow tobacco.'
+
+These are some of the rules. Everyone knows the story of how the rules
+later became unbearable--the fixing of selling-prices by the Company,
+the paying of taxes, the limitations set on selling produce to the
+ships.
+
+The conditions, however, and the dangers from the Hottentots on the
+east side of the shadow, were thankfully accepted.
+
+In the old records there is the entry which explains the position of
+these little colonies:
+
+                                         '_February 21, 1657._
+
+     'Fine sunshine, fickle weather.'
+
+     'Many having been informed of the intention of the Masters
+     to establish freemen all about and under favourable
+     conditions, a party of five selected a locality on the
+     other side of the Fresh River (Liesbeek), named by us the
+     Amstel, _below_ the forests and beyond it where our
+     woodcutters are, near the crooked tree about three leagues
+     from the Fort, and as long and broad as they wished it, on
+     condition that they were to remain on the other side of the
+     river. Another party of four selected a spot about a league
+     nearer, at the Rondebosjen, on this side of the river or
+     Amstel, from the small bridge leading to the forest as far
+     as the spot chosen for the redoubt, near where the bird
+     trap is to be built. The boundary of that land will be
+     three-quarters of a league long, the river will divide them
+     from the other party, and they will go back as far as they
+     like to Table Mountain and the other mountains. The party
+     of five may go forward towards the mountains of the
+     continent proper, as far as they like; these two parties
+     are therefore stationed right on the isthmus in fruitful
+     soil. The further colony has therefore been named Amstel,
+     or the Groeneveld, and the farthest redoubt will be about
+     quarter of a league beyond it. The nearer colony at
+     Rondebosjen (which is to be converted into a cattle kraal
+     and to be provided with a gate) is to be called the "Dutch
+     garden." A redoubt will also be built there.'
+
+And then began some amusing correspondence between the Honorable
+Commander and his honorable employers at Amsterdam.
+
+Very few of these freemen had wives. Jan Reyniez had married the
+Commander's niece Lysbeth, Jacob Cloeten sent to Cologne for Frau
+Fychje Raderoffjes, and a few other wives were ordered out; but,
+grumbled the Council from this strenuous settlement, 'Here are good
+freemen, who would willingly marry if there were any material
+(_stoffe_)'--to quote from the old documents--
+
+     'These young men have accordingly prayed and begged us [the
+     Council spared no words] to ask girls (_meis-jen_) for
+     them, whom they may marry. We therefore request
+     outward-bound families to bring with them strong, healthy
+     farm girls, and the Company would make the condition that,
+     when arriving at the Cape, the good ones might be retained
+     and all others permitted to go on; as between Patria and
+     this, it will be easily discovered what sort of persons
+     they are.'
+
+So in like manner, as bread fell from heaven to the Israelites in the
+desert, or as the British Government supplied wives to their Virginian
+Colonies, came wives to the freemen at the Cape. But rather hard for
+the families who were to have their good maids retained.
+
+It is a surprising thing, in looking over the old Roll-call, to find
+so few old Cape names. The varying forms of spelling may account for
+this.
+
+In the old title-deeds one finds some lands in Table Valley granted to
+one Cornelius Mostaert, a well-known name; then there are mentioned
+Cloeten, Cloetas, Muller, Theunissen, Visagie, and a Van der Byl, who
+was a 'messenger of justice,' and rode from Cape Town to the Bosheuvel
+on his rounds; but the large majority are almost unknown names.
+
+But we have arrived at Rustenburg, off the wagon road which leads to
+the forest on the slopes of the Bosheuvel, or 'Hen and Chickens Hill,'
+where Amman Erichiszen, the keeper of the forest lands, planted most
+energetically the great pine-trees which now, like an invincible army,
+have marched over all the lands.
+
+It is said that the original buildings at Rustenburg have been
+destroyed. Marinus and I choose to think differently, as the position
+of the present building must be on the exact spot. Rustenburg has
+degenerated into a high school for girls, and bears itself like an
+aristocrat in the stocks. Its long teak windows and rows of Doric
+pillars look imposing enough to suggest the ancient glories which are
+so carefully recorded: 'This day the Commander takes out a party to
+inspect the Company's corn-lands at Rond die Bosje'--Van Riebeek on
+his famous horse, 'Groote Vos'; Maria de Quellerai, his wife, in a
+coach with the guests; Governors on their way to the East--the Great
+Drakenstein, Van Oudtshoorn, Governor Van Goens, the Java Commander
+who gave so much advice on his way to and fro, the Van der Stels still
+working in the East; the Admirals of Return and Outward
+Fleets--Vlemdingh, Van Tromp, De Reuyter--with their wives and
+families; the famous Commander of the French Fleet, M. le Marquis du
+Quesne, and so many others. Do their ghosts disturb the dreams of the
+little high-school 'backfish'?
+
+At the back of the Rustenburg buildings, to the left, following a path
+which was probably a way to the Groote Schuur, are the remains of some
+old orchard lands, and some years ago I remember going with a troop of
+excited girls, in the terrifying hour of twilight, to see the old
+slave burial-place, which lay to the right of a path leading to the
+summer-house and 'Rustbank'--a small white seat still to be seen near
+the little red-roofed tea-house. To the right of this spot is the
+house called 'The Woolsack,' where Rudyard Kipling has lived every
+summer for years. Here were remains of graves, old bits of tombstone,
+old decaying skulls--oh! the horror and pleasure of these evening
+desecrations! An orgie for the emotions which makes one adore the
+past.
+
+Above the Woolsack towers the Wind Mountain, on its slopes the white
+and grey granite temple of the Rhodes Monument.
+
+
+THE RHODES MEMORIAL.
+
+One day someone sat gazing at the big Devils Peak, which shadows
+Groote Schuur and stands like a rampart of the Citadel Mountain
+behind. As he gazed he became inspired; he said: 'There should be a
+monument to Rhodes, just there, on those steep green slopes under the
+Watch House, where the heavy Dutch cannon were dragged up to defend
+the bay.' The Rhodes trustees rose up and formed the chorus.
+
+So began the drama of the monument.
+
+The players were reinforced. Watts from London sent a huge bronze
+group, Physical Energy, which is the beginning in the game of
+progress. John Swan, with his wonderful head of a Michael Angelo
+prophet and a later Roman Emperor, Rodin of the English, came himself
+and drew designs for paradoxical lions.
+
+This was our train of mind as we rode up the fir avenue of Groote
+Schuur bordered with blue periwinkle flowers.
+
+  [Illustration: BLUE HYDRANGEAS AT GROOTE SCHUUR]
+
+Home of Rhodes and a hostel for passing visitors of name and fame, it
+was the 'Great Barn' of long ago--the Great Barn where the 'Company's'
+corn, grown under such difficulties, was stored in times of
+plenty, that there should be food for the Company's servants, ever
+busy fighting off the Hottentots across the Flats, when the Batavian
+Directors, with great omnipotence, decreed that the homeward-bound
+fleet should find no room to carry rice to the vegetable settlement of
+Bonne Esperance. For the Company settled in the shadow, not to found
+an empire beyond the seas, but to 'grow vegetables for their ships.'
+
+Groote Schuur, the great barn with its present building carefully
+imitative, its masses of blue hydrangeas and wisteria, white-walled
+terraces of plumbago and magenta bougainvillæa, and its tall
+pine-trees and deep, fern-banked glen.
+
+There is something adorable in the green plaque over the front
+entrance--and instinctively it is _chapeau bas_--a small group of
+Dutchmen and Hottentots on the seashore--'The Landing of Van Riebeek.'
+The simplicity of the thing starts the weaving of the spell, which, in
+the plod, plod of life at the Cape, is a forgotten aspect. No nation
+can ever be great that has no time for sentimental patriotism. Why is
+it that this Africa cannot hold its people? There is talk of the Call
+of the Sun, but it does not hold fast, this Sun call. If Progress goes
+north and all new effort must wander away from the Patria, it must not
+be allowed to wander without the shibboleth of sentiment. A domestic
+simile would be invidious.
+
+Marinus, my guide, is used to my wanderings, and the horses are slowly
+climbing the steep gravelled path behind the house. Past cool woods
+filled with arum lilies and fantastic, twisted young oaks, looking to
+the heated imagination like fauns and satyrs, which send back one's
+mind to a long-ago atmosphere of mythology.
+
+This atmosphere increases, and culminates at the Temple of the
+monument.
+
+In a large sloping field to the right of the path live, in happy
+monotony, four or five llamas, while in another teak-gated enclosure
+the striped zebras are gazing in mild surprise at a fierce wildebeeste
+stalking along the other side of the thin wire fence.
+
+Far across the purple sandy flats with their blue barriers to the
+north--the 'Mountains of Africa'--lie the big vleis, or lakes, and
+near them the tall white spire of the tiny Lutheran church, little
+shepherd of all the German souls who cluster round in white farms,
+growing lettuce on week-days and singing Lutheran hymns on Sunday.
+
+At the top of the gravel road, almost buried in a kloof of stunted
+oaks and yellow protea-bush, is a cottage, where the two sons of that
+fat King of the Matabele, Lobengula, lived and were educated. What has
+happened to them since Rhodes's death I do not know; they may be
+studying French and science at the Sorbonne, or, having married
+somebody's 'respectable English housemaid,' may be the happy fathers
+of a tinted family of pupil teachers or typewriters!
+
+We climbed higher, and were soon in the shadow of the Devil's Peak or
+Doves Peak.
+
+The name 'Devil' must have drifted from the 'Cape' to the Wind
+Mountain. 'Windberg' was the ordinary name for the Peak, and 'Devil's
+Cape' was the name given to the Cape many years before Diaz's ship was
+driven round into the Indian Ocean.
+
+Humboldt, the German traveller, has interesting information about this
+name. He says that on Fra Mauro's world chart, published between 1457
+and 1459, the Cape of Good Hope is marked 'Capo Di Diab!'
+
+Diaz, to his surprise and unintention, rounded the Cape in 1486.
+
+But even before this, others than the 'Flying Dutchman' sailed these
+seas. On the old planisphere of 'Semito,' made in 1306, the tricorned
+shape of South Africa is shown, and in a note added later to the
+planisphere it is stated that an Indian junk coming from the East
+circumnavigated this Cape 'Diab.'
+
+To those who have thought of this Cape as shrouded in mystery until
+the Portuguese sailors rounded it, the shock might be similar to the
+state of mind of the Ignoble Vulgar (used in the sense of ignorance),
+who find, one day, that quite a decent system of education existed
+before the Flood; but shattering a fallacious perspective may not
+necessarily widen a horizon, and Sheba's Mines of Ophir, the voyages
+of the Phoenicians, Moorish slavers, Indian junks, gold, and apes,
+and peacocks, and Flying Dutchmen, may still be in the jig-saw pattern
+border of South Africa.
+
+Groups of almond-trees guide us to two cement and iron cages. There,
+lying blinking benignly in the sun, are the famous lions of Groote
+Schuur--almost monuments in themselves.
+
+Did not their ancestors roam over these very slopes of the mountain,
+and swoop down into the cornfields and ricefields of the Company's
+burghers, seeking water and shelter from the raging north winds, in
+the comfortable piece of land 'Rond die Bosch' below?
+
+Passing the lions, we are still mounting to the east ridge of the
+Peak. Somewhere George Eliot says, 'attempts at description are
+stupid--how can one describe a human being?' The assertion does not
+apply entirely to human beings. Who but refuses to bear attempt at
+minute description, and who but would fail in the attempt to describe
+the wonderful view which suddenly appears--the shining blue rim of
+Table Bay, a harmony in blue and silver, Watts's 'Energy' in
+silhouette, the giant horse and rider dominating a huge precipice, the
+precipice which is the narrow, flat, and sandy isthmus of the
+Peninsula? All round and down the slopes are soft, green forests of
+firs.
+
+  [Illustration: THE BLUE SHADOW--VIEW FROM RHODES' MONUMENT]
+
+The inscription on the statue runs: 'Physical Energy, by G. F. Watts,
+R.A., and by him given to the Genius of Rhodes.'
+
+From the foot of the group in bronze and granite we look up the huge
+steps to the grey granite temple, the grey rocks of the mountain
+behind, and the 'Silver-Trees' keep the eye and senses running along
+the gamut of greys.
+
+Behind the tall pillars runs another inscription--'Dedicated to the
+Spirit and Life Work of Cecil John Rhodes.' The paradox to this will
+be found in the statue, or bust, of Cecil John, to be placed by the
+trustees in the niche below. It is in the nature of man to embody,
+allegorically, in human form, virtues and vices, but surely it were
+better to leave the good deeds of the man, which belonged to the
+Spirit, in the care of this wonderful grey granite temple. To the Life
+and Spirit! Few bodies make temples worthy of the Spirit, and Cecil
+John failed to prove the rule. But 'how truly great is the Actual, is
+the Thing, that has rescued itself from bottomless depths of theory
+and possibility, and stands as a definite indisputable fact ...' and
+the Knowledge and the Practice, which are the elements of the mighty
+Physical Energy, hang over the abyss of the Known, the Practicable.
+
+The man and his life 'rest on solidity and some kind of truth.'
+
+So we came down from the heights.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+'PARADISE' AND THE BARNARDS
+
+
+From Newlands we rode, one glorious afternoon, up a small, conical
+hill at the back of Fernwood, or the old homestead 'Boshof.' There are
+several ways of arriving, but we, full of enthusiasm, chose to take a
+stony path hedged by scented wild-geraniums and ripening blackberry
+hedges, along which more than a hundred years ago a big wagon had
+rolled, dragging up the hill, as far as the ravines and rocks would
+allow, two occupants--Mr. Barnard, His Excellency's secretary, and
+Lady Anne, his wife.
+
+There has been a great 'Barnard' cult of late, and the people who have
+wondered at the romantic and witty correspondence of Lady Anne and the
+Secretary of State for War, Lord Melville, have perhaps gained some
+geographical knowledge of the Cape Peninsula one hundred years ago. I
+adore Anne for her sense of humour; Marinus adores her for her
+faithfulness to Barnard, whom for various reasons I have depicted to
+him as a dullish and obliging man.
+
+  [Illustration: THE SOUTHERN PART OF THE FALSE BAY, WITH CAPE HANGCLIP]
+
+Behind this overgrown hill at the top of the Newlands Avenue lies
+'Paradise,' where Anne Barnard lived during the summer, and which she
+called her Trianon!
+
+So Mecca-wards we rode, with the gigantic grey wall of Table Mountain
+towering before us.
+
+We turned our horses round to face the Flats! We saw the great plains
+before us, once so bare that you could have seen a Hottentot crawling
+among the sandhills miles away; the Bosheuvel Hill, or 'Hen and
+Chickens,' standing out to the right, with its crown of silver-trees
+shivering and shining in the sun. To the east lay False Bay--thousands
+and thousands of emeralds set in cream; to the left, the dull, low,
+crouching Tygerberg Hills, full of propriety, sleek and smooth. Below
+us lay the Bishopscourt woods--the old Company's 'Forest lands' hiding
+the river and the squirrels and the black babies of Little Paradise,
+or Protea, with the branches of their enormous oak-trees--_chapeauz
+bas_ to Wilhelm Adrian Van der Stel.
+
+Anne Barnard wrote other letters than those to Lord Melville; she
+wrote in long charming letters to her sisters at home a description of
+the pretty little place called 'Paradise,' halfway up the hill, which
+Lord Macartney wished her to have; 'how she could not drive up the
+hill, but had to alight,' and walk, and thought the way to Paradise
+the proverbial path, hard and steep, and thought less and less of His
+Excellency's offer the steeper the path became. She writes--all out of
+breath:
+
+     'On turning round, a sequestered low road appeared, over
+     which oaks met in cordial embrace--the path which, suddenly
+     turning, presented to us an old farmhouse, charming in no
+     point of architecture, but charming from the mountain which
+     reared itself three thousand feet perpendicular above its
+     head, with such a variety of spiral and gothic forms,
+     wooded and picturesque, as to be a complete contrast to the
+     hill which we had ascended or the plains over which we
+     gazed. Before the house, _which was raised a few steps from
+     the court_, there was a row of orange-trees. A garden, well
+     stocked with fruit-trees, was behind the house, through
+     which ran a hasty stream of water descending from the
+     mountain; on the left a grove of fir-trees, whose long
+     stems, agitated by the slightest breeze of wind, knocked
+     their heads together like angry bullocks in a most
+     ludicrous manner.'
+
+'Anne! What do you say to this?'
+
+Mr. Barnard speaks in much admiration. Anne, still breathless, feeling
+happier, but her skirts are torn by the blackberries and low bushes:
+
+'Why, that I like it, I am vexed to say, beyond all things.'
+
+His Excellency's Secretary, becoming more elated (Anne having bright
+pink in her flushed cheeks): 'And if you do, my dear Anne, why should
+we not have it?' (This with all acknowledgment of the lamentable
+fact, which I impress upon Marinus, that Anne's approval is the only
+thing which will matter; Marinus always argues that in the other scale
+are 'Robin Gray' and that packet of letters which Lord Melville tied
+up with blue ribbon.)
+
+Anne answers the adoring Barnard, not too decisively: 'Because the
+World's end is not so distant as this spot from the haunts of men.'
+
+Barnard's last effort is worthy of a diplomatist; he sighed: 'It's
+very charming, however.'
+
+They visited a number of other places, but Barnard's sigh won the day;
+and a new road was made to 'Paradise' by the slaves--a road we were
+presently to see, still showing the hard brick foundation, winding and
+hugging the mountain from the present Groote Schuur Road.
+
+There is a delicious description of a day at 'Paradise' in the
+wonderful 'Lives of the Lindsays'--the mad, witty Lindsays! and Anne
+was one of them--and she wrote as amusingly and wittily to her sisters
+as she wrote to Melville, and she tied up the beautiful Cape wild
+flowers in gauze bags to send to 'my dearest Margaret.'
+
+I sometimes think that the letters, which are known to be in a famous
+collection kept from the world, must be less philosophical, less
+cynical, less amusing, and more in accord with the mood in which Anne
+wrote 'Old Robin Gray.'
+
+That in 1797.
+
+This in 1909--Marinus and I asking our way of an old black woodcutter,
+with feathery green 'Newlands Creeper' twisted round his hat--that
+heirloom of the old slave descendant--a broad, passive grin crinkling
+over his face: 'Jaa, Missis; Missis want ole slavy-house--want get by
+ole "Paradise"? Yaa, vat I know ole Paradise; working by dese woods
+tirty years--fader, grandfader, all working by "Paradise."' So we
+followed him, our guide, our ponies scrambling up the slippery,
+moss-covered pathway, the trees growing low and thick, obscuring the
+sunlight, the dark figure of the woodman always running before us.
+Deeper and deeper we plunged into the low woods, when turning suddenly
+to the right and going slightly downhill, quite behind the fir-covered
+koppie, we came into 'Paradise.' Found! and in ruins! And I picked
+ferns from the walls of Anne Barnard's dining-room!
+
+Here was the courtyard with the chief buildings facing north; on the
+right, the long stoep showing remains of the curved, rounded steps. On
+the left are the walls of lower buildings--probably the kitchens which
+the Barnards built.
+
+We left our ponies with the black man and pushed our way in silence
+through the overgrown garden, all the terraces still banked up by
+small stone walls, now moss-covered, past little garden paths running
+along the mountain-stream, and fig-trees long since overgrown and
+forgetful of bearing fruit; and higher up towards the mountain we
+found two graves and four or five chestnut-trees--'the finest
+chestnuts I ever saw by many, many degrees,' says Anne.
+
+But wherever we went the thin, twisted, fantastic oaks, like deformed
+gnomes reared in the dark, barred the way of 'Paradise' to intruders,
+and with the rustling breeze the frightened squirrels and the ghosts
+of this Trianon rushed away before us into the gloom.
+
+Once, when sitting alone, only breathing a little Greek poem of praise
+to Pan, I thought I saw a ghost of this dead 'Paradise,' forming
+etheresque, vague and elusive, between the green hanging strands of
+creepers.... It was only the web of a wood-spider caught in a shaft of
+sunlight which had shot through the heavy roof of leaves. The garden
+which should have grown the most sensitive plants now grows weeds;
+only in a deserted corner we found a quaint, aromatic pink flower with
+a scent which suggested the East.
+
+The light was fading; Anne in her letters remarks upon this: 'The sun
+sets here in "Paradise" two hours sooner than on the other side of the
+hill, which I am told marks its height, but with lamps and candles it
+makes no difference. We have nothing here to annoy us--except
+mosquitoes and the baboons who come down in packs to pillage our
+garden of the fruit with which the trees are laden.'
+
+So we recovered our ponies from the woodcutter, who told us he had cut
+wood round 'Paradise' for over thirty years, and followed the
+red-brick slave-road which brought us to the middle of the Newlands
+Avenue. 'Paradise,' with its shy ghosts, its decay, its charm, and its
+memories of Anne, we placed at the back of our minds like little
+sacred hidden temples, and the essence of it all burnt like incense in
+their shrines.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE LIESBEEK RIVER
+
+
+We traced one day the old boundary-line, the Liesbeek River, from its
+mouth near the Salt River to its sources in the woods of Paradise and
+Bishopscourt.
+
+In some of the old record-books I found this entry, which will do as a
+prologue to the chapter:
+
+                                      'CABO DE BONNE ESPERANCE,
+                                         '_September, 1652_.
+
+     'Riebeek and the Carpenter proceed' (it was proceeding with
+     some great care and danger in those days) 'to the back of
+     Table Mountain' (a vague term for everything which was not
+     visible from the fort). 'Here to examine, whether there are
+     any forests other than already mentioned on the Lion
+     Mountain, as the timber from home has been much spoilt, and
+     is too light for the dwellings, in consequence of the heavy
+     winds from the mountain we dare not leave our heaviest
+     houses without supports. We found in the kloofs fine,
+     thick, fairly strong trees, somewhat like the ash and
+     beech, heavy and difficult to be transported. We found on
+     some trees the dates 1604, 1620, and 1622, but did not
+     know who carved them. Astonished that so many East India
+     voyagers have maintained that there is no wood here. Found
+     also fine soil, intersected by countless rivulets, the
+     biggest as broad as the Amstel (Liesbeek), and running into
+     the Salt River.'
+
+This well-watered ground round Bishopscourt and Newlands became the
+Company's forest lands.
+
+In 1656, when the Commander went on another tree-hunting expedition,
+there is another entry:
+
+                                            '_August 31, 1656._
+
+     'The Commander proceeds to the cornland, has some tobacco
+     sown, and proceeds behind Table Mountain, where the forests
+     are. He found very many sorts of trees similar to pine, but
+     no real pines, and not one higher than 6, 7, or 8 feet.'
+
+The Commander grew to love the forests, and land was granted him on
+the banks of the Liesbeek (where Bishopscourt now stands) in an almost
+dangerous situation, for day and night a watch was kept on the
+Hottentots lurking in the bushes of the Hen and Chickens Hill, or
+secretly striving to drive their cattle across the river into the
+Company's grazing-ground. The river, the watch-houses reported, was
+fordable, and cattle were constantly stolen. And as we were now
+pushing our way through the bushes and brambles along the overgrown
+banks, so in 1658 did Van Riebeek ride out with Van Goens 'all
+through the reeds, shrubs, lilies, and marshes.'
+
+The old Diary goes on:
+
+     'He found the forest so closely grown from the one point to
+     the other that no opening could be found than the wagon
+     road, which might be easily closed with a bar. No cattle
+     could pass through this wood, even if thousands of
+     Hottentots were driving them. It is about two hours distant
+     from the fort, as far as Visagie's dwelling and brewery
+     below the foot of the Bosheuvel, where the Commander one
+     morning showed Commander Van Goens, when they were walking
+     over the Bosheuvel (with a Hottentot who did not wish that
+     land should be cultivated there), a spot on which to build
+     a small redoubt or watch-house, to protect the lands in the
+     neighbourhood, and to which spot the River Liesbeek could
+     be made navigable for small boats from the fort and through
+     the Salt River. But as the Liesbeek is thickly studded with
+     reeds, etc., 1½ and 2 feet high, it will be necessary to
+     make a clearing on the sides, in order to examine the whole
+     more carefully.'
+
+Then started a great labour, and many seamen were busy for months
+clearing the river, until, with much triumph, it was written in the
+journal that in 'some places it was found to be the depth of a pike.'
+
+The river as far as Rondebosch is not interesting, and often
+impossible to follow, as it runs through private grounds and is very
+overgrown by oaks and poplars. At the extreme end of Rondebosch it
+becomes wider. At Westerford, or the West Ford, the main road crosses
+it on a bridge, and the old history is perpetuated in the name given
+to a shaded road running past the brewery--Boundary Road.
+
+At Westerford is one of the old, fast-disappearing Outspan places--a
+big, bare spot under the oaks, with the white walls and thatch
+outhouses of the homestead which once belonged to Mostaert, 'living on
+the other side of the Schuur.' Here we saw, as we rode past, some
+wagons outspanned, the small black boys busy watering the mules and
+oxen in the river below, farmers lying about wreathed in tobacco
+smoke--the old days seem so quaintly characteristic, in spite of the
+near proximity of a wine-store and a forage-loft. A scene of busy
+lethargy--if such a paradox is permitted. I imagined how much more it
+meant in the olden days, when the hard-grown corn, and flax, and hemp,
+and tobacco were brought in from the brave little colony in the
+Groeneveld; how they rushed through the deep ford to this outspan of
+safety on the right side of the river.
+
+The river runs through a lovely wood at the bottom of Government
+House, Newlands, and on its steep opposite bank is 'The Vineyard,'
+which little place--lately belonging to the Manuel family--was
+designed and built by the Barnards, when the angel with the flaming
+sword, in the guise of a new Governor--decrepit, weak old Sir George
+Younge, with his debts and dissipations--turned them out of
+'Paradise.'
+
+Anne writes to Melville from 'The Vineyard' on March 14, 1800:
+
+     'I am living out of town at our little country place, which
+     we purchased, built a cottage on, and called "The
+     Vineyard," removed from all party work, except working
+     parties in our fields, rooting up of palmiet roots[3] and
+     planting of fir-trees and potatoes.'
+
+'The Vineyard,' which is in due order the correct place to fly to when
+one has lost 'Paradise,' must have been a great refuge to the
+Barnards. Those were troublous times of social intrigue--the old order
+and the new--the Barnards weeping over the departure of the poor
+Governor Macartney, wary, well-bred and witty, all crippled with gout;
+old Younge, arriving with his sycophants; the General, Dundas, busy
+fighting the natives and courting the rather dull lady who came out to
+marry him; the entire gang eyeing poor Anne in her comfortable
+stronghold in the Castle, and (one may gather) keeping no judicious
+guard over their tongues. Anne rose to the occasion, offered her
+Castle home to the General and his Cummings gave a good party for the
+ladies of the staff, and retired to watch the dénouement from the
+comforting distance at 'The Vineyard,' and to write philosophical
+letters on the political situation, which, in the district of
+Graff-Reinet, was of an inky blackness.
+
+The long oak avenues of Newlands House on the opposite bank gave us
+Canaletto-like perspectives of the low white house and twisted
+chimneys, the green lawns and deer-park, and the intensest blue
+hydrangeas. I have seen a drawing of the house as it was in the time
+of Lord Charles Somerset, with oval verandah, otherwise very much the
+same. It ultimately became the property of an old Van der Pool, who
+left it to the famous Hiddingh family, who have for years leased it to
+the Government. A namesake of his was an amusing character, living in
+semi-darkness and dirt, hoarding up his unprofitable wealth. An old
+black woman who was once his cook told a very good story of this old
+miser. Van der Pool was noted for having in his cellars the best wine
+at the Cape--no one ever tasted it. He hated spinach, but spinach grew
+in the garden, and therefore must not be wasted. In the dark
+dining-room, with an old gazette serving for a tablecloth, sat old man
+Van der Pool waiting for his dinner. Up came the dinner, 'Saartje'
+with a big dish of spinach rotten with long keeping. Old man Van der
+Pool cursed Saartje and spinach in best Dutch, and 'made a plan.'
+'"Saartje," say ole Bass, very gentle, soft like, "go fetch me from
+die cellar a best big bottle of ole Pontac." I run fetch ole Pontac;
+ole Bass, he put die bottle jus so, in front of him. "Now," he say,
+"Saartje, you trek." I trek out not farder dan die door keyhole. I see
+ole Bass pour out best old Pontac and put die spinach in front too.
+"Now," he say, "Hendrick, you see dis fine, werry, werry fine ole
+Pontac, you eat dis verdommte spinach first, den you drink dis wine,
+wot's been standin, Hendrickie, Kerl, for werry many years." Ole Bass,
+he eat, eat fast as I nebber seen him before; den, when all spinach
+done, ole Bass he pour die wine back in die bottle. He laf, laf, and
+he say, putting his finger to his nose, "Hi! Hendrick, I fool you dis
+time, I tink, fool you pretty well."'
+
+  [Illustration: OAK AVENUE, NEWLANDS]
+
+We left the river for a time and got up a side avenue into the big
+Newlands Avenue, near Montebello and the brewery. All this estate,
+once called the Palmboom, or Brewery Estate, belonged to old Dirk Van
+Rheenen, or Van Rhénen, Anne Barnard's friend, the most hospitable man
+in all the Peninsula. Dirk got the Government beer contract and built
+a wonderful mansion, designed with all its white stateliness and Doric
+pillars by a Frenchman who came out to build the Amsterdam Battery--at
+least, Marinus says so. But I have another story which is as well
+told. Anne Barnard is my authority, and she says she considers the
+Van Rheenen house possessed the air of a European mansion, it being
+erected by his own slaves from an Italian drawing he happened to meet
+with. There is a quaint description of how the Barnards' party went
+a-dining with Mynheer Van Rheenen:
+
+     'The family received us all with open countenances of
+     gladness and hospitality, but the openest countenance and
+     the most resolute smile, amounting to a grin, was borne by
+     a calf's head, nearly as large as that of an ox, which was
+     boiled entire and served up with the ears whole and a pair
+     of gallant horns. The teeth were more perfect than dentist
+     ever made, and no white satin was so pure as the skin of
+     the countenance. This melancholy merry smiler and a tureen
+     of bird's-nest soup were the most distinguished _plats_ in
+     the entertainment. The soup was a mass of the most aromatic
+     nastiness I ever tasted, somewhat resembling macaroni
+     perfumed with different scents; it is a Chinese dish, and
+     was formerly so highly valued in India that five-and-twenty
+     guineas was the price of a tureenful of it. The
+     "springer"[4] also made its appearance, boiled in large
+     slices--admirable! It is a fish which would make the
+     fortune of anyone who could carry it by spawn to England.
+     The party was good, the game abundant, but ill-cooked, the
+     beef bad, the mutton by no means superior, the poultry
+     remarkably good, and the venison of the highest flavour,
+     but without fat; this, however, was supplied by its being
+     larded very thickly--all sorts of fruits in great
+     perfection, pines excepted, of which there are not many at
+     the Cape. Mynheer carried us off after dinner to see his
+     bloom of tulips and other flowers; the tulips are very
+     fine, and the carnations beautiful; _all were sheltered
+     from the winds by myrtle hedges_. Our gentlemen returned
+     delighted with the day they had spent, and very glad to
+     have the prospect of another such.'
+
+Gigantic appetites, hadn't they? And if Anne hadn't tasted it all how
+could she have commented with so much definiteness? They grew tulips
+here! Why not? But they won't grow, is the answer. I expect the secret
+lies in the neat myrtle hedges, which can yet be seen in some
+old-fashioned gardens in Sea Point and Cape Town. They drank well and
+unwisely, also, these Peninsula people. Thompson remarks upon this in
+his book on the Cape: 'The Pokaalie cup, like the blessed beer of
+Bradwardine, too often drowns both reason and refinement.'
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] Palmiet is a high, strong river-weed.
+
+[4] A fresh-water fish.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE BOSHEUVEL, OR HEN AND CHICKENS HILL
+
+
+We crossed the river at the bottom of the Bishopscourt gardens, and
+found ourselves looking down the long fir avenue, arched as perfectly
+as the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Opposite, ran another little avenue
+along the side of the hill, and to the right, staring at us like black
+and white toadstools of monstrous size out of the green gloom, the
+thatched cottages of Bishopscourt.
+
+We chose a little narrow pathway running up the hill from the middle
+avenue, winding through low protea-bush and silver-trees.
+
+  [Illustration: SILVER TREES AND WILD GERANIUMS]
+
+There is cruel, continuous, silent fighting on this hillside--the
+battle between the silver-trees and the firs. The firs, or pines, who
+came here last, are creeping, year by year, higher and higher up the
+hill; year by year the brave little 'witteboomen' (white trees) are
+driven before this strong green army of invaders; soon there will be a
+last stand on the hilltop--the survival of the fittest. We shall all
+see it; we are seeing it every day of our lives--and will no one
+help? The pines are helped by unthinking man in his horrible
+materialism--the silver-tree branches are easy to break off, and make
+good fuel. Day by day, like a file of gaudy beetles, the dwellers of
+'Protea' crawl along our little path and down again to the river huts,
+with loaded shoulders, and leave the silver woods leaner.
+
+A hundred years ago Anne Barnard, herself a tree-planter for the
+generations to come, talks with satisfaction of 'The Marriage of Miss
+Silver-tree and Donald Fir-tops.' Marinus says I am a sentimental
+traveller, but it is a distressing end to such a _ménage_ after only
+one hundred years! Barrow, the naturalist, speaks of the moth which
+feeds on the _Protea argenta_, and suggests turning them to some
+account, seeing that it is said to be exactly the same insect which
+spins the strong Indian silk called 'Tussach.' Here is an idea of
+interest, but that means the protection of the silver-tree. There is
+in Cape Town a society for the preservation of objects of national
+interest--a slumbering giant of the moment. The protection of natural
+objects of national importance and beauty should appear as an
+amendment on its syllabus. In France, a fat little bourgeois Ministre
+de l'Instruction Publique et des Beaux Arts, or the fatter and more
+bourgeois Sous-Préfet of a small town, will run about on any hot day
+or any cold day, with all the importance and authority of the State
+embodied in his active patriotic French body and his 'red ribbon,' and
+behold! 'Messieurs, you would destroy this tree--"tiens!"--destroy the
+beauty of France, "je vous demande?" Never, "jamais de la vie!"' The
+tree stays. That ancient wall destroying the value of a good building
+site--'tant pis!' It remains! 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité'--the New
+Rule; but we must perforce worship the Old. Such the snobbism of La
+Patrie, La France.
+
+Such is my plea for the shining, Ancient Inhabitants of the Bosheuvel.
+Most travellers assert that they are unique, growing in no other part
+of the world; and many affirm that they are indigenous. Their
+evolution is distinctly traceable in the soft grey silkiness on the
+back of the leaves of the large, yellow protea-bush. A careful walk
+across the Wynberg hills, and you will come back to report that nearly
+every shrub or even quite tiny ground plant is of the protea family,
+vastly productive and attractive family, from the yellow giants with
+their pink-tipped cousins, the sugar-bushes--the treasure caves of the
+bees and tiny, brilliant, green sugar-birds--to the top-heavy white
+protea, sometimes painted, like Alice's red rose-tree, a deep crimson.
+Some very distant cousins, who have not risen sufficiently high in
+their world, have no flowers at all, only brilliant-coloured red and
+yellow stem tops.
+
+We have seen the Bosheuvel in many moods and seasons; we have been
+there when the sweet-smelling pink flower, half acacia, half pea, the
+Keurboom, lines the paths, and Bishopscourt lies in a deep blue sea of
+mist, while above, the 'Skeleton' and 'Window' Gorges are mauve with
+aching buds of the oaks in early spring. Now it is middle summer, with
+fields of yellow mustard flower, tall blue reeds, and wild-geraniums,
+of which it is said that 'this tribe of plant alone might imitate in
+their leaves every genus of the vegetable world.'
+
+Our ponies crackled their way over the dead silver leaves as we
+climbed over this old outpost hill, from whose summit the agitated
+freemen or soldiers would see the 'Caapmen' dancing round their fires
+below. The hill has a fighting reputation; terrible murders of slaves
+and burghers and cattle-thieving were daily recorded from the vicinity
+of the Bosheuvel in the first Commander's journal. Van Riebeek,
+walking up from his farm below, saw 'Kyekuyt,' his second outpost,
+burning away to the tune of this Hottentot singing; saw the Saldanhas
+pressing close to its base, forming one long ominous barrier along the
+blue shadow. His mind was full of tricks for peace. By a clever ruse
+he turned these savages with their herds through the Kloof Nek, hoping
+they might wander away to Cape Point. But they hurried back over the
+Constantia or Wynberg Pass, and their cattle fed with the Company's
+cattle, and they danced once again on the 'Hen and Chickens,' whose
+grey granite boulders, several small rocks clustering round a big one,
+would form fit temples for these worshippers of the moon.
+
+When we reached the famous 'Grey Hen' overlooking the Wynberg Park,
+Marinus produced a small piece of paper, and read from it this scheme
+of peace, signed in full by the Council and the Commander,
+recommending their decision to the grace of God and the approval of
+Amsterdam: 'That not only should the Colony be protected from the
+ravages of the Hottentots by the redoubts placed at intervals along
+the river, with the last and farthest on the Bosheuvel, called "Hout
+den Bul" (Hold the Bull), but a fence of bitter almonds should be
+planted across the Bosheuvel, stretching to the bottom and then going
+off at a direct angle along the river lands to the seashore.'
+
+On our way along the river we have behaved with more inquisitiveness
+than respect; most unsuspecting people have had their gardens and
+fields incautiously explored by Marinus and me. Here and there we have
+found in the overgrown garden of a thatched house, in a tangle of
+oleanders (or Chinese roses, as the Dutch call them)--and goodness
+knows they are the only flowers that can possibly account for the
+floral decorations on old China--myrtle hedges, Cape jasmine, and
+magnolias (can't you smell the garden?), a few little clumps of the
+shining, green bitter almond, the last of the old fence.
+
+It is not, however, hard to find on the Bosheuvel Hill, though it is
+always being destroyed in the bush fires so frequent on the hill, when
+in a few minutes hundreds of trees have given one sharp crackle of
+agony, and are charred heaps of silvery ashes. We traced it, this old
+warrior of a hedge which was once the only shade for the horsemen and
+soldiers stationed at the Redoubt. It crosses the middle of the hill.
+It once looked on one side on the farm of the Commander, and on the
+other side on the huts and kraals of the Hottentots, whose erring
+cattle poked their uncivilized horns through its thick greenness; and
+now its aged branches lap over a barbed-wire fence which runs along
+the farms Oosterzee and Glen Dirk, of Mr. Philip Cloete and his
+brother; while, on the other side, the firs and oaks hide the white
+walls of Bishopscourt. The silver-tree and the bitter-almond hedge are
+the Ancient Inhabitants, and Marinus and I felt we were friends and in
+league with the barbed-wire fence, and we hated the position.
+
+So we rode down the hill into the Wynberg Park, and leaving the camp
+on the left we crossed the glen at the bottom of Glen Dirk, and,
+behold, we were in a sea of vineyards, the purple bunches almost
+resting their ripe weight on the burning pink earth.
+
+Some old naturalist thinks that it is to the laziness of the old
+vine-growers that we owe the slow evolution of our wine. No tall
+trellised vines or standards of France and Spain and the Rhine, no
+rows of mulberry-trees supporting the hanging tendrils as in Italy,
+but low, stubby-looking little vine-sticks; and, says my authority of
+a hundred years ago, 'as is well known, the exhalations from the earth
+are so much imbibed by the leaves of the tobacco plant which grow
+nearest to it, that those leaves are always rejected as unfit for use,
+so it is natural to suppose that the fruit of the vine hanging very
+near to, or even resting upon, the ground, will also receive the
+prevailing flavour exhaling from the soil.' This was the theory of a
+theorist. I have the authority of a wine-maker who says that it is not
+only the heavy spring winds that have necessitated low vines, but that
+the Cape wine was, and is, essentially a sweet wine, and to procure
+the right amount of sugar it is important to grow the vines as near
+the ground as possible, that the radiation of the sun off the ground
+may ripen them. Later came the demand for a lighter wine, and creeping
+vines were introduced grown on wire, but as close to the ground as
+possible, otherwise the wine does not maintain itself, and becomes
+acid. The old Pontac vine, which is a creeper by nature, was treated
+in the old days, and is still treated as a creeper, by tying a long
+cane across the centre of the tree, so that it lies horizontally
+across, close to the ground; no wire is used, or the days of sweet
+Pontac would be over.
+
+My first authority, the theorist, deplores, in excellent English, the
+slackness that existed in the making of wine and brandy. I remember
+with horror seeing in Constantia cellars the old process in full
+swing. Huge vats--the hugeness of a fairy-tale ogre's bath--raised
+high up in the gloom of the cellar, the sickening smell of
+fermentation, the squash, squash, bubble, bubble, of the juice oozing
+through the vat holes, and the sweating blacks, in tunics that reached
+to the knee and were once white, treading and squashing the grapes,
+their black faces bobbing up and down in the great vats, sometimes
+singing, or spitting out the chewed tobacco, the Nirvana of the
+workers. My whole body and soul revolted against this physical
+strength and stench--to me it was the greatest weapon in the total
+abstainer crusade; the nauseous odour of malt and beer is nothing to
+it.
+
+Oh! it's a fascinating subject, this culture of the Vine, as old as
+the hills, and with the greatest sympathy do the Jew and the Gentile
+view it; and its cosmopolicy is almost perfect. It makes brothers of
+strangers, swine of brothers; it is an everlasting monument to
+Adam--he went out of Paradise to till the ground, and wherefore till
+unless to grow the vine which alone can make him forget Paradise--and
+in its long pageant come passing by, old Noah and his sons, who
+peopled the earth; Dionysius and his followers--his troupe of
+Bacchantes revelling in leopard skins, purple grapes and flowing hair,
+and in turn their ghastly following of fauns and satyrs, the chorus
+for their appalling rites and festivals; then comes the solemn
+Persian, whose women carried the purple wine while he sang the praises
+of both, in the guise of the philosophy of the most ancient Abyssinian
+Universities; in great disorder crowd along the poisoners of early
+Rome and the Renaissance, carrying their fatal goblets; the decadent
+revellers of Lemnos in artistic drunkenness--roses and pearls and wine
+and the heated dancers of inspiration, which made luxury to be
+desired. In the crowd, jostling with all, pass Popes and Cardinals
+with more wine--strange vicissitude! The Host of the Lord followed by
+the faithful--it is now become the religion of the world. Then come
+the painters, the great 'primitives,' and the makers of the new
+religion, creators of sublime pictures--a 'Last Supper'; the wine in
+the cup, pure red, as red as the wine Bacchus is flinging over his
+drunken followers, as red as the wine of Omar, of Cleopatra's
+love-philtres dissolving pearls. Great Fellowship of the Vine; it
+rules the world! Continue looking: there is more procession;
+picturesque, besatined men who have fought picturesque duels, and
+gambled and drunk wine in the coffee-houses (what a paradox!), men who
+have made poems and books, and run States and Empires, and have laid
+with unflagging regularity under their tables in the respectability
+which rank and custom made possible; and looming in the gloom behind
+the pageant are the shadows of the invading army. They, too, have kept
+their pattern in this kaleidoscope; the men who have made a Hell for
+the drunkards--the Ironsides, Calvinists, Protestants, a dull crowd to
+follow such gorgeousness. The Banners of Temperance are Grey and
+Green: and grey is an enduring colour, and clashes with nothing; and
+green is the colour of the World! the Earth! and the woods! leaves and
+pure water! the singing of birds! time to sleep, time to eat, time to
+listen! This may be behind the grey banners; but the Eyes of the
+Pageant are near-sighted and tired with overmuch colour and vibration,
+and the Ears of the Pageant are tuned too high to hear the song of
+birds.
+
+We have been round the Mulberry Bush, round and round....
+
+     'This is the way we have brushed our hair;
+     This is the way we have washed our faces;
+     This is the way we have eaten our food;
+     This is the way we go to bed;
+     This is the way we get up again.'
+
+All the cynical philosophy of that child-game brings us back to where
+we started--the vineyards.
+
+I told all this to Marinus as we lazed along the path through the
+vineyards, with Klastenbosch Woods on our right and tiny thatched
+farms with a symmetrical patch of cabbages and violets supporting each
+household: the slopes of the Tokai or Steenbergen ranges before us,
+'Un paysage après Claud.'
+
+Constantia was once divided into two big plots--Great and Little--and
+a few things in between which didn't count much.
+
+Now--well, there are such pretty names; old Klastenbosch, its
+outhouses dying in their old faith, with dilapidated Dutch white and
+green and low stoeps, while the dwelling-house flaunts its regenerated
+walls in newly-acquired glory, full of comfortable English
+furniture--the fullest example of the new South African nation, in
+ideals laid down by a clever man--_enfin!_ what could be more solid
+than such combination? English, Dutch, and German. But the
+Klastenbosch pigs are still black, and they grunt and nozzle in the
+oak forest and along the stream with the wild olive-trees on its banks
+_comme autrefois_. To continue the list of names. Just below us in a
+poplar forest lies 'Belle Ombre'; to our left is 'Alphen'; and we
+trotted past its gates and low white walls, along the avenue of
+twisted, red-dusted stone-pines, past 'Hauptville,' a tiny spot in the
+midst of its acres of vines, and up the pink, pine-edged Constantia
+road to Groot Constantia.
+
+  [Illustration: FIR AVENUE--ALPHEN]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE CONSTANTIA VALLEY
+
+
+Lady Anne Barnard writes amusingly of a visit she paid to this green
+valley from her home on the other side of the hill, to the house of
+Mynheer Cloete, who once had to pay one thousand dollars for a large
+piece of Druip[5] stone. In a cave beyond Sir Lowry's Pass this
+gentleman saw the mass of petrifaction, and thinking it a safe thing,
+he made a bet with a Boer standing near that, though no one could
+possibly get such a fragile mass over the pass, he would give one
+thousand dollars to have it at Constantia. The fragile mass, and the
+Boer, turned up one day at Constantia, to the disgust of Mynheer.
+
+Lady Anne took Lord Mornington, stopping at the Cape on his way to
+India, to lunch with this Cloete, who showed her a new blend of wine
+which he had himself invented. 'I was astonished,' she remarks, 'to
+hear a Dutchman say he did anything his father had not done before
+him, for when I asked him why such and such a thing was not done, he
+shrugged his shoulders and said 'it was not the custom.' A
+characteristic episode, I fancy, and one which has taken too long to
+change, independence of mind and imagination not being smiled upon by
+cautious contentment.
+
+As Governors-General did not often pass the Cape, Mynheer brought out
+his best and oldest port, sherry, and claret, and 'the gentlemen's
+prejudices got the better of their manners'; Mynheer Cloete copiously
+drinking foreign claret, remarking, 'My wines are valuable; and I am
+glad when others like them, but I do not; whoever prizes what is made
+at home?'
+
+A few years before Mynheer did without his after-dinner (luncheon)
+'slaap' to entertain Lord Mornington and the Barnards, Monsieur Le
+Vaillant, turning his unappreciated French back on the town 'where
+only the English are loved,' wandered into the quince and
+myrtle-hedged vineyard of Cloete's Constantia, where his host, a
+Jacobin to his finger-tips, gave him a 'sopje'[6] of his best
+Constantia, and Le Vaillant bewailed his prejudiced Cape Town audience
+aloud:
+
+'Mynheer, here in your Kaapstad, it is the English who are adored;
+when they arrive, everyone is eager to offer them a lodging. In less
+than eight days everything becomes English in the house upon which
+they have fixed their choice; and the master and the mistress, and
+even the children (with his fine laces ballet-dancing round his waving
+and gesticulating hands), _et même des enfants!_ soon assume their
+manners.' Then came the currant in this suet. 'At table, for instance,
+the knife never fails to discharge the office of the fork! Would you
+credit this, Mynheer? I have even heard some of the inhabitants say
+that they would rather be taken by the English than owe their safety
+to the French.' Mynheer, deep in his 'sopje,' grunts a Dutch grunt of
+uncompromising depth.
+
+This garrulous French explorer found this rich old Cloete less
+sympathetic than his Jacobin friend Broers, for whose services at a
+critical time a grateful French Government was not unwilling to shower
+rewards, and Le Vaillant left Constantia to write of it: 'That this
+celebrated vineyard does not produce a tenth part of the wine which is
+sold under its name. Some say the first plants were brought here from
+Burgundy, others from Madeira, and some from Persia. However this may
+be, it is certain (in 1782) that this wine is delicious when drunk at
+the Cape; that it loses much by being transported; and that after five
+years it is worth nothing. Close to Constantia is another vineyard,
+called the Lesser Constantia (Klein Constantia), but it is only within
+these later years that it has begun to be held in the same esteem as
+the former. It has even sometimes happened that the produce of it has
+been sold for a larger sum than that of the other at the Company's
+sales! As it is separated from the other only by a plain hedge, it is
+probable that there was formerly no difference between the wines, but
+in the manner of preparing them. Only the rich use the wine of other
+countries.'
+
+A not too flourishing 'koopman' (merchant), a lover of the English and
+a well-known despiser of the popinjay little Frenchman, hearing this
+remark in a coffee-house, and not counting on the irrepressible
+Broers, sat one evening on the stoep of his long, flat-roofed house in
+the Wale Street. Up from the Heerengracht, across the canal bridge,
+came Monsieur le Français with friend Fiscal Broers. This was an
+opportunity to be seized. 'Dantje!' echoed in loud tones down the Wale
+Street. Dantje the slave came running up from the kitchens. 'Fetch
+some red wine immediately.' 'The vanity of this man,' says the
+triumphant Le Vaillant, 'is ridiculous. Mr. Broers assures me that he
+has not a single drop in his possession, and that he had perhaps drunk
+of it ten times in his life.' On this account, having reached the top
+of the street, they turned round and beheld the knowing Dantje pouring
+out beer! Slimmer Kerl! There seems justifiable reason for belief that
+Dantje scored heaviest in this particular case.
+
+By now we have passed the gates of High Constantia and Klein
+Constantia, and very soon have reached the Government wine-farm,
+Groote Constantia, Simon Van der Stel's home, of which so much has
+been written, and which we passed rather hurriedly; for it does not
+please me to know that its best furniture has disappeared, that the
+new wine cellars have iron roofs, that the old bath is overgrown with
+brambles and weeds, and that convicts in a plague of arrow-marked
+garments frighten the birds who come to 'steal in the vineyards.' We
+cut across country into the Tokai road, through a violet farm, whose
+charm dies when the flowers fade in early summer. There are acres and
+acres of violets, hedged by poplars, and deep streams which water them
+and overflow into potato lands lying lower down in 'Retreat' country,
+and help to feed the 'vleis' at Lakeside. We raced along a mile of
+sandy lane lined with firs and protea and heath, called, by reason of
+some virtue, 'The Ladies' Mile.' This road led us to the farm 'Berg
+Vliet,' behind whose white walls we passed into a sandy vineyard
+track, and soon we reached the Tokai convict station and the oak woods
+of the Manor House.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] Druip stone--_i.e._, stalactite.
+
+[6] A 'sopje' or 'sooppie,' a glass of rack or gin, or, rather, a
+French brandy. Before sitting down to dinner it was etiquette to offer
+a 'soppe' or a little white wine, into which wormwood or aloes had
+been infused in order to excite the appetite.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE MOUNTAIN
+
+
+To realize the Cape Peninsula one must stand on the lower plateau of
+Table Mountain, near the Wynberg Reservoir: there is a clear, neat map
+of the country laid out before one.
+
+We drove up over the Hen and Chickens Hill, the road running parallel
+with the old bitter-almond Hedge to the teak-gated enclosure on the
+'Rhodes Road.'
+
+It was a misty morning, though the sun was hot; the Flats were mostly
+in shade, with long shafts of light striking across the sand-dunes and
+the 'vleis.'
+
+A trolley, dragged by a white horse, brought us through a grove of
+silver-trees to a tin shed, where a coolie half-caste told us that we
+should have to wait for the mountain trolley, which was then running
+up coal and food to the workers at the reservoir on the mountain above
+us.
+
+  [Illustration: CONSTANTIA VALLEY AND FALSE BAY, WITH CAPE POINT]
+
+The thin mist crept up and down the slopes, and hordes of black
+flower-pickers passed us, carrying huge bunches of pink and
+purple flowers, gathered from the Skeleton and Window Gorges, to be
+sold next morning in Adderley Street.
+
+A small black trolley, with planks across the top to serve as seats,
+slipped through a clump of gum-trees, stopped at the shed, and we
+climbed in. The damp mists crept lower, and Marinus lent me his big
+black mackintosh. The trolley was hauled up the one-in-one gradient by
+a rope worked by steam. Running from the front of the car to the iron
+bar at the back of it was a small piece of dilapidated-looking rope,
+the object of which I could not imagine. Slowly we climbed through the
+gum-trees, and came face to face with the grey wall of mountain
+towering before us.
+
+The rays of sun caught the silver-trees below, and they flashed their
+farewells as we mounted into the mists. On our right were slopes of
+pale pink gladioli and gentian-blue flowering reed. On our left,
+clumps of scarlet-red 'Erica' heath and brown grasses, and
+far--terribly far--below us the Rhodes Road winding close to the
+mountain over Constantia Nek.
+
+Suddenly I felt the rope tighten, and instinctively (no need to ask
+its use now) found myself clinging and crouching forward with a tense
+feeling in my throat.
+
+The mountain seemed almost to hang over the car, yet the line went
+straight up.
+
+I smelt the pungent scent of wild-geraniums, and knew there were pink
+flowers, but my eyes saw not.
+
+The rope slackened, and I looked back!
+
+I understood why Lot's wife became a pillar of salt: we had come up
+over the edge of the world.
+
+Once, like a reassuring presence, a small black car ran down past the
+trolley, almost brushing my coat.
+
+Twelve minutes of this, then before us were iron sheds and black and
+white genii--the men who had made the line and the men who worked the
+trolley. Inside the shed the puffing little engine of magic power.
+Then the 'man who makes' on the mountain hurried us off, through a
+forest of thin firs, on to a plain of rock and white sand, with not
+more than ten feet of view around.
+
+It was a mysterious walk, this pilgrimage in silence through the
+rain--soft, soaking stuff of spray--past huge water-worn boulders,
+grey granite gargoyles that peered at us through the fog. No sound but
+the noise of our footsteps on the damp white pathway, and the crunch
+of small pebbles as we passed between grey walls of rock.
+
+Suddenly the way became a field of mauveness, palest pink and purple
+flowers, hedged by masses of tall, yellow, flowering reeds, while
+close to the damp earth grew hundreds of sweet-smelling
+butter-coloured orchids and white crassula.
+
+As we watched our phantom party moving through the flowers in their
+unpractical garments, Marinus reminded me of how Anne Barnard had
+climbed this mountain in scanty skirt, her husband's trousers, and
+pattens. The memory of Anne made me sing something Scotch--not her own
+song, 'Robin Gray,' but 'Loch Lomond.' I sang very softly to suit the
+mists, elusive spirits with feathery wings.
+
+As I sang there came a noise of driven waters, the clouds moved away,
+and before us was a lake: a great ocean it might have been, for one
+saw no farther shore, but only big angry waves dashing against the
+rocks.
+
+The 'man who made things' took us down the bank and led us on to a
+huge wall with a cement pathway and a thin iron rail.
+
+On one side of the water, a sheer drop of over a hundred feet, a drop
+into ferns and creepers and gorgeous greenness. On the other side,
+sixty feet across, were the wind-driven waters of the big Cape Town
+reservoir, and the clever fingers of the 'man who made' pointed into
+the mist to where there was another of those caged seas, 'The highest
+dam in Africa--in all Africa,' he said, with some suspicion of
+satisfaction in his voice.
+
+Big waves splashed over the stone wall, and through the mist we heard
+a dog bark from the caretaker's cottage across the water.
+
+
+A DIARY FROM DISA HEAD, TABLE MOUNTAIN.
+
+                                           DISA HEAD, TABLE MOUNTAIN,
+                                               _January 29, 1910_.
+
+A small Norwegian Pan is sitting on a big grey rock beside me as I
+write; he is a Christian, civilized imp by birth, and his name is Olaf
+Tafelberg Thorsen, and he is a Viking by descent. He is round and
+brown as one of the little pebbles that lie on the white shores of the
+big blue dams, and his eyes are like the blue-brown pools that are in
+the shadow of the 'Disa Gorge.' This world, which I had only seen
+through the grey mists, is sparkling in the perfect atmosphere of some
+2,000 feet above the sea.
+
+The same trolley I have spoken of before ran me and my baggage up the
+Wynberg side of the mountain. On top I was met by its inventor and the
+father of Olaf Tafelberg, and we formed a procession, to walk for
+three-quarters of an hour to this home on the grey rock above the dam,
+where months before I had heard a dog bark out of the mist.
+
+Olaf Tafelberg has a Viking brother, Sigveg, fair and blue-eyed, who
+knows every flower on the mountain. Then there is a girl child with
+nothing more distinctive than the most distinctive name of Disa
+Narina; but she has the same simpleness of manner as the buxom brown
+Lady Narina, beloved by Monsieur Le Vaillant--the 'model for the
+pencil of Albano'--'the youngest of the Graces, under the figure of a
+Hottentot.' This fascinating Hottentot, whom Le Vaillant met with on
+his inland travels, became a kind of dusky and rustic Egeria. But
+Narina possessed more morality than morals, and made life very
+pleasant for herself, acquiring many fine bracelets and
+head-handkerchiefs from her devoted Frenchman, whose 'sentimentality'
+induced him to weep over the far-travelled letters of Madame Le
+Vaillant, and to be content to see Narina in the capacity of a game
+dog who would tramp for miles with him along the banks of the river
+Groot-Vis.
+
+But this is a diversion from the small Disa Narina of Table Mountain.
+Narina is the Hottentot word for flower, and the flower is a gorgeous
+species of lily in every shade of red, pink, and maroon, covered with
+shining gold dust. There is a picture by an old Dutch master of the
+time of William of Orange, hanging in a room in Hampton Court--dull
+pink narinas in a gold vase.
+
+The red grandiflora Disa grows in a deep gully running right through
+the mountain. The father of Disa Narina took me into the gorge over
+which the great white dam wall towers, and down which 25 to 50 million
+gallons of water rush weekly into the thirsty Cape Town reservoirs. We
+watched it dashing and splashing out of its narrow valve pipe down
+this steep ravine with towering, fern-covered cliffs on either side,
+down into the soft blue distance, where it rushes through a tunnel,
+and is lost from sight. Poor water! to leave those lovely blue lakes
+for dusty Cape Town; no wonder it grumbles and foams all the long
+length of the Disa Gorge. Some of it escapes--for a rest--into the
+dark brown pools that lie round the low tree-roots in the shadow of
+the dripping fern cliffs.
+
+I climbed along some fallen boughs into the coolness to pick the fern,
+which is a bright pink colour where it grows in the shadow. High above
+I saw the crimson disa and terracotta heath, and, edging the pathway,
+a pure mauve flower and gentian-blue lobelia, the ancestor of that
+little blue border for English flower-beds. The first lobelia emigrant
+left the Cape in 1660, and arrived to find London almost too busy
+welcoming a new-old King to worry very much about its little Colonial
+blueness. Still, it has found a certain rural fame, and has returned
+to the land of its birth; but its mountain brothers, who are citizens
+of the world, would wonder at its small size.
+
+We climbed down the gorge through an aromatic hedge of shrub and tall
+red gladiolus and royal blue agapanthus, until we came to a projecting
+cliff, called 'Lover's Leap,' which has the romantic and tragic
+tradition that its name implies. Instead of being overpowered by its
+tragedy and its height, I sat down on a sun-warmed rock, and so
+closely in our souls are the praises of all religions allied, that,
+stirred by the pureness of the air, the blueness of the distances, the
+sea before me and the distance of the world below, I unconsciously
+quoted the words which are written by Walt Whitman in that creed of
+the vagrant philosopher, the 'Song of the Open Road': 'The efflux of
+the Soul is happiness; here is happiness; I think it pervades the open
+air, waiting at all times.
+
+'Now it flows unto us: we are rightly charged; the earth never tires.
+
+'I swear to you that there are divine things more beautiful than words
+can tell.'
+
+                                          _Sunday, January 30, 1910._
+
+I have spent the morning in the fir-woods which fringe the dams.
+Through a dip in the mountains facing east, I see the blue peaks of
+the Hottentot's Holland Ranges. A trolley brought me and my books down
+from the house on the rock, and I walked up the 'Kitchen Gorge' to
+find an old Hottentot cattle kraal--the grey rocks covered with
+lichen--and close beside it, on the side of the mountain, a concave
+rock big enough to hold six herds. Just above us the famous 'Echo'
+Valley, where Anne Barnard, having discarded many pairs of pattens,
+called on her party to drink the health of His Majesty King George,
+'not doubting that all the hills around would join us: "God save the
+King--God save great George our King!" roared I and my troop. "God
+save--God save--God save--great George--great George--great George our
+King!" echoed the loyal mountains.'
+
+Anne was almost the first woman to climb up the mountain, and there
+was pretty heavy betting against it in the town.
+
+Among her party was one of the pleasantest, best-informed, and most
+eager-minded young men in the world--a Mr. Barrow, a naturalist and
+explorer, who was employed by the Governor, Lord Macartney, to report
+on the Colony, and especially its unexplored territory. Barrow wrote a
+life of Lord Macartney and a two-volume book of travels in Africa, in
+which it is amusing to trace the way of all explorers--the casting of
+dark doubts on the writing of those who have been before. Le Vaillant
+dismissed the disgraceful old gossiper Kolbé in a few well-timed
+words: 'The Residence of this man at the Cape is not yet forgotten. It
+is well known that he never quitted the town, yet he speaks with all
+the assurance of an eyewitness. It cannot, however, be doubted that,
+after an abode of ten years, having failed to accomplish what he was
+commissioned to do, he found it much easier to collect all the
+tipplers of the Colony, who, treating him with derision whilst they
+were drinking his wine, dictated memoirs to him from tavern to
+tavern, tried who could relate to him the most absurd and ridiculous
+anecdotes, and amused him with information until they had drained his
+bottles. In this manner are new discoveries made, and thus is the
+progress of the human mind enlarged!'
+
+In turn Barrow treats Monsieur Le Vaillant in like manner. For while
+visiting some years later the farm on which Le Vaillant killed some
+tigers with so much éclat and danger that a few pages are devoted to
+the feat, Barrow hears a very different story at the famous house of
+Slabert in the Groen Kloof. The family knew Le Vaillant well, and Mr.
+Barrow read his travels aloud, to the intense amusement of the
+Slaberts. Barrow says in his book: '... But the whole of his
+transactions in this part of the country, wherein his own heroism is
+so fully set forth, they assert to be so many fabrications'; that the
+celebrated tiger-shoot was done entirely by their own Hottentots'
+trap-gun; and that the gay Le Vaillant found the animal expiring under
+a bush, and, with no great danger to himself, discharged his musket
+into the dying tiger! Le Vaillant had set out to find a barbarous race
+said to wear cotton clothing. His first book of travels in the East
+had sold well, and here in Africa Kolbe's imagination had left little
+scope for improvement; hence these revilings.
+
+                                            DISA HEAD, TABLE MOUNTAIN,
+                                                   _January 31_.
+
+There was no sunrise this morning; a driving mist and a howling, black
+south-easter. 'Table Mountain has put on its peruke,' says the witty
+Le Vaillant, so there will be no fir-woods or flower-hunting this
+morning; and I am sitting in a small office. Through the windows, in
+the minutes between the mists, I can see the blue Indian Ocean and
+Hout Bay, and the tallest heads of the Twelve Apostles Mountains, or
+'Casteelbergen' as they used to be called. Every hour it grows
+clearer, and the wind keeps the clouds high up, their great dark
+shadows flying across the grey rocks like a defeated army of Erlkings.
+A big bird battling against the gale in the Disa Valley reminds one of
+the story told by some old traveller, who states that, when the
+south-east wind blew very strongly, whole swarms of vultures were
+swept down from the mountain into the streets of Cape Town, where the
+inhabitants killed them, like locusts, with big sticks!
+
+The world is showing itself now, but all looks cowed and dominated by
+the fury of the wind. A mad game this--wind and clouds in league,
+making a sun-proof roof, with only the noise of the gale, the splash
+of the driven waters in the dams below, and the bells of the goats
+walking round the house in the fog.
+
+  [Illustration: A SUNSET ON THE LION'S HEAD: EFFECT OF SOUTH-EAST WIND]
+
+
+THE FIR-WOODS AT DISA HEAD.
+
+I have seen the kingdoms of the world, and am satisfied--a wondrous
+state of mind and body! I have sat on a ledge of crassula-covered rock
+and looked down upon Cape Town--Lion's Head far below us, the green
+slopes scarred by innumerable red roads, the bay clear and calm
+beneath us, and a gentle south-east breeze with the coolness of water
+behind us. To the north, line upon line of low hills swimming in blue
+haze, the farms of Malmesbury showing up like little white beacons in
+the plains; to our left the Platt Klip Gorge, like a great rent in the
+grey mountain. My guide, who is a philosopher, started a story--at
+least, I thought it was a fairy-tale--of a sanatorium on the flat top
+and a railway. 'Cape Town has got that up its sleeve'--I realized that
+he really was speaking sense. It will happen, of course, in the
+natural order of things; and it will bring the believers and the
+unbelievers--those who see and those 'who pick blackberries to stain
+their faces'--the cool gorges will echo with their voices, the Disa
+will be hedged round with regulations stronger than barbed wire, and
+the swampy ground which now grows shiny white pebbles will grow
+potatoes and lettuce for the multitude.
+
+In the old journal we have the first record of the climbing of Table
+Mountain:
+
+                                 '_Sunday, September 29, 1652._
+
+     'Fine day. Our assistants and two others ascended Table
+     Mountain with the Ottento, who speaks a little English; saw
+     the fires lit by them; ascent difficult; top of mountain
+     flat--as broad and three times as long as the Dam of
+     Amsterdam, with some pools of fresh water.'
+
+The present pool has very little water; but then, it is summer, and we
+took the rain gauge for the month and poured back on to the earth
+three large drops of water!
+
+Barrow, in his description of the ascent, which he made in the
+charming company of the Barnards, talks of the view from the top: 'All
+the objects on the plain below are, in fact, dwindled away to the eye
+of the spectator into littleness and insignificance. The flat-roofed
+houses of Cape Town, disposed into formal clumps, appear like those
+paper fabrics which children are accustomed to make with cards. The
+shrubbery on the sandy isthmus looks like dots, and the farms and
+their enclosures as so many lines, and the more-finished parts of a
+plan drawn on paper.'
+
+But we crossed the flat top and came to the Wynberg side: saw the
+country, neatly mapped as Barrow says, bathed in sunshine. My guide
+has been a sailor, and has travelled round the world, but here he
+says: 'Here is the best view in the world!' and he went off to examine
+more rain gauges.
+
+It is a wonderful thing to be utterly alone with the earth and the
+sun; to become a hill Pantheist, but to realize why, in a hot stone
+church, one can get up and sing that the Sun, the Moon, the Air, the
+Mountains, and the Earth may bless and praise the Lord.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+ROUND THE LION'S HEAD AND THE VICTORIA ROAD
+
+
+Sea Point lies, white-roofed and aloe-hedged, under the sanctified
+Lion's Head Mountain; sanctified, because of a great white cross
+scarred into the bare rock by a nation to whom crosses and scars were
+almost inseparable. Da Gama's gigantic cross on the Lion's Head is one
+of the many to be found round the coast; but here begins and ends
+every trace of Portuguese possession or atmosphere in the Cape
+Peninsula.
+
+  [Illustration: ON THE VICTORIA ROAD, NEAR OUDE KRAAL]
+
+Old Sea Point savours of ancient Dutch régime, but is hedged in on
+every side, hidden, almost lost, by Cape Town Commerce _chez eux_. But
+along the Beach Road, running from the old Downs, or Common, to the
+Queen's Hotel, are houses with names which are historical:
+flat-roofed, whitewashed houses, with high stoeps and stucco
+fountains, syringa-trees, cactus plants, and hedges of flaming red
+aloes behind their white garden walls; old-fashioned gardens with
+box and myrtle hedges, lichens and gaudy mesembryanthemums crawling
+like giant starfish over the walls. Edging the road and hiding the
+beach from travellers are thick hedges of kei-apple, a prickly red
+berry, and of a low shrub whose leaves furnished correct food for the
+imported French snails, whose descendants are purely a pest and have
+no justification. But the French-lavender hedges and pink Huguenot
+roses can still say 'Bonjour' to the snails. It is the only French
+word any of them remember; it is prettier than the 'Dag,' which the
+prickly-pear, gorgeous with orange and carmine flower, grunts across
+the road to the hedge of wax berries; it is prettier, too, than the
+'Morgen,' which is the large white 'Frau Karl Druschki's' morning
+greeting; just a little daintier than 'Saka bona,' from the purple
+jacaranda and scarlet kaffir-boom; but far, far more charming than the
+chorus of 'Hullo! hullo!' from the cheerful English trees and plants
+in this white-walled garden. And then there is the sea--not the
+wind-swept sea of False Bay, but a cosmopolitan sea; a highroad, where
+ships of many flags sail past the rocks, bound for the world.
+
+In one white-roofed house lived a man on whose importance hung the
+beginning of a nation. The resolution in favour of responsible
+government had been passed by the Lower House of Parliament. The
+decision now rested with the Council. To be a member, the
+qualification meant possessing property to the value of some thousand
+pounds over and above mortgages. The member whose vote turned the
+balance was in such bad circumstances, that even if the mortgaged
+white house at Sea Point was sold he would not be qualified for this
+momentous voting. His friends, filled with national and patriotic
+zeal, rushed out to Sea Point: 'Have you, then, nothing of any value?'
+they cried. 'Yes; I will show you something which might be of some
+value. I was once in Turkey and of service to the Sultan.' He produced
+from a deep-shelved Dutch cupboard with brass fittings, then of little
+account, a small gold case, filigree-worked, and inside a snuff-box
+sparkling with diamonds, rubies and emeralds. 'Given by the Sultan,'
+said he of the important vote. Nothing more, just this _soupçon_ of
+adventure. Responsible government was carried on a snuff-box.
+
+Sea Point possesses the two best private libraries in the Peninsula.
+One of them belonged to a great little man, Saul Solomon, of
+Clarensville, who died some years ago. Public men never live long
+enough at the Cape to die in the fulness of attainment; ambition and
+principle go but slowly hand in hand if you would have them travel
+along the same road, but Saul Solomon's name is high in the annals of
+politics and principles. The rocks below Clarensville, or probably
+those larger granite masses beyond the Queen's Hotel, were
+celebrated fishing-places in the days of the early Commanders; but one
+short entry thrills one and dissipates the ideal dulness of the gentle
+art. During the Van Riebeek reign a corporal went fishing for 'klip'
+fish amongst the brown seaweed which lies like a barren reef round the
+south-west coast, when a lion wandered down to the beach, and left so
+little of the angler that nought of him was found but his trousers and
+his shoes: which we imagine he had discarded, and was not
+discrimination on the part of the lion.
+
+  [Illustration: CAMPS BAY, ON THE VICTORIA ROAD]
+
+Marinus and I climbed into a green tram which ran along a high
+mountain road overlooking the lower Victoria Road. We reached Clifton,
+a little kraal of houses and bungalows, and left the tram and walked
+down to the lower road through an old farm-garden. The steep slopes of
+the cliff down to the sea were covered with brilliant green shrub and
+purple flowers. Strolling along, we came upon Camps Bay, which we
+fancy was Caapmans Bay; for here the Caapmans, or Hottentots, pastured
+their flocks during their 'merry-go-round' journeying from the Fort,
+over the Kloof Nek, along the Casteelbergen, or Twelve Apostles Range,
+to Hout Bay; then often over the Constantia Nek to worry the outposts
+on the Bosheuvel, and back to the Fort; or from Hout Bay to Chapmans
+Bay and Noord Hoek, and on to Cape Point. Their last stronghold was in
+the Hottentot's Holland Mountains; but in the year 1714 nearly all
+the tribe were exterminated by the smallpox. Four chiefs
+remained--'Scipio Africanus,' 'Hannibal,' 'Hercules,' and 'Konja'--who
+received, says the old chronicle, 'the usual stick with the brass
+knob,' the insignia of office. Camps Bay gave the old map-makers and
+Commanders some trouble; but they all found the great line of breakers
+prevented the bay from being used either for themselves or for the
+landing of hostile forces.
+
+On the slope of the Lion's Head, above the bay, is a little round
+white house, the Round House, where Sir Charles Somerset spent his
+week-ends. Sir Charles, whose reign here was during the end of the
+eighteenth century, used several of the old homesteads as
+shooting-boxes.
+
+Marinus, with enormous satisfaction, found a stray taxi, and soon we
+had passed the 'Oude Kraal' of the watermen on our way to Hout Bay.
+The turreted tops of the Casteelbergen, or Twelve Apostles Mountains,
+were 'canopied in blue,' their slopes covered with a bright mauve
+Michaelmas daisy. The narrow road curves and curls round their sides,
+and below stretch acres and acres of sea, horizonless, heaving and
+sinking, blue and green and gold, lapping against the edges of the
+land in crescent-shaped little bays, or dashing against walls of rock.
+The cliffs, grass-grown down to the water, are covered with flowers,
+big clumps of prickly-pear, and blue aloe, every freshly-turned
+corner more lovely than the last. There is one other road in the world
+to compare with it, and that road runs along the South of France into
+Italy; but the waters of the Mediterranean are _fade_, lifeless waters
+to the ocean that fringes the Casteelbergen in Africa.
+
+  [Illustration: HOUT BAY AND HANGBERG]
+
+Far out into the sea stretches a reef of sharp rocks where many ships
+have found a terrible end: the steep, slippery slopes beyond the
+little Lion's Head isolate the coast from all assistance.
+
+In front of us a dull green car was swinging round the curves. 'We'll
+pass her,' said Marinus, who was driving. The road is not wide--just
+room enough for two cars to pass abreast. The green car saw us coming,
+and decided we should not pass her. Marinus jerked his head forward,
+and vowed we should. For ten minutes I sat rigid; my eyes never left a
+small spot of mud on Marinus' coat. Between us and the mountain was
+the green motor; to our right was the sea. We dashed round corner
+after corner, a great juggernaut or machinery with not a spare yard of
+road. It was a glorious gamble, with almost a thousand to one that
+round the next corner we should meet something--a car or a cart. The
+cars ran silently.... Suddenly someone's nerve failed; we had passed
+the green car, and Marinus turned round to me and grinned. 'All
+right?' he said. My jaw seemed set in plaster of Paris, so I grinned
+too. The chauffeur was cursing softly and rapidly. Over the brow of
+the Hout Bay Nek was a big white car, full of people and wild flowers,
+coming towards us. I bent forward close to Marinus, so that the
+chauffeur should not hear. 'You brute!' I whispered; 'but it was
+simply great.' And Marinus winked.
+
+We rushed down the hill, lined with pink protea, into the village of
+Hout Bay, or the Wood Bay, where the Company's yachts and sloops would
+come to carry away wood from the thick forests. No sign of forest
+now--only some low, wind-stunted trees along the beach. The Dutch
+fortified the bay, and the ruins of their fort still stand.
+
+Chapman's Peak hides the curve of the coast and the Noord Hoek and
+Kommetje Valleys. Near the village is the old home of the Van
+Oudtshoorn family, whitewash and teak, high-stoeped, with stucco
+designs, and the date over the door. The Hout Bay Valley has a
+distinctive charm of its own; its river-bed is overgrown with palmiet,
+and its thatched farmhouses have Huguenot names: for in this valley
+grants of land were made to the Huguenot refugees, the road is hedged
+with little pink Huguenot roses growing over the ground which pastured
+the Hottentots' cattle. The farm, Orange Grove, lies low in an oak
+wood. We climbed the long Constantia Nek, and once more saw the
+widespread Isthmus, Constantia, Wynberg, and False Bay; little farms,
+little woods, the smoke from an engine--we had been round our world in
+a few hours.
+
+  [Illustration: CHAPMAN'S PEAK AND SLANG KOP POINT FROM HOUT BAY]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+FALSE BAY
+
+
+The old road from Wynberg to Muizenberg is no longer traceable. I
+imagine it started from Waterloo Green, as all old Wynberg was centred
+round the hill. A convent stands back from the green, but, like the
+poem in the story of 'Through the Looking-Glass,' if you look again
+you will see it isn't a convent at all, but the old Wynberg homestead,
+one of the early grants of land to a freeman, the home of Mynheer
+Cloete.
+
+Wynberg hides its archives in overgrown gardens of oleander,
+wild-olive, blue plumbago hedges, cool white gardenias and red
+hibiscus flowers, cypress-trees and date-palms, brought from the East
+by retired soldiers from India, with large livers and small pensions,
+making their curries and their chutneys in the little thatched
+bungalows of old Wynberg. To one of these, still standing and acting
+as a stable to a big white house in the oak avenue which we fancy is
+part of the old road, came Wellington on his way to India, and gave
+his name to the avenue. On our way along the main road to Muizenberg
+we passed a renovated homestead, probably one of the old rest-houses,
+now used as a convalescent home, but its gardens are full of old-world
+memories, willows, and myrtle-hedge, and arbours of strange trees,
+bent and twisted into fantastic coolnesses.
+
+There is a dull stretch of wattled road running through Plumstead,
+Diep River, and Retreat. At Diep River the flooded lands grow
+potatoes, at Plumstead they grow vegetables, all in amongst the
+wildness of the big plain covered with vleis and protea-bush and
+purple and crimson heath. The Retreat is historical. It lies on the
+Cape Town side of the Muizenberg Mountains, which seem to spring up in
+granite and green from the sea. A narrow strip of land at their base
+spoils the illusion--'The Thermopylæ of the Cape,' says an old
+enthusiast some hundred years ago. Through the narrow pass between the
+sea and mountains retreated the famous Burgher Cavalry, abandoning
+their position at Muizenberg before the guns of the _America_. But
+history, I fancy, regards the Battle of Muizenberg more as a
+diplomatic coup than as a serious fight. Even the cannon-balls, which
+are dotted along the road from Kalk Bay to Muizenberg, are ending
+their uneventful days in seaside peace, and their resting-places in
+soft sand speak of further diplomacy.
+
+Near Lakeside are several old farms with lost identity. Over the
+hill, leaving the lovely vleis behind us, we came upon Muizenberg,
+from an architectural point of view the saddest sight in the world;
+here are two old landmarks, the one so renovated that it is almost
+unrecognizable, the other a ruin. The first was a low, whitewashed,
+thatched homestead--an old inn, or rest-house, as the Dutch called
+it--and it was named 'Farmer Pecks.' The oldest inhabitant cannot tell
+why, but I remember the original building with its celebrated
+signboard. The story of the signboard is as follows: 'Two middies,
+many, many years ago, returning to Simonstown from Cape Town, where
+they had been on a jaunt, arrived one dark night at Muizenberg. It was
+a twenty-mile walk--twenty miles along a difficult track, across a
+dangerous beach of quicksands (Fish Hoek), and they were travelling on
+foot, because very few people could afford a cart. It was too late and
+too dark to continue their journey, so they had to put up at Farmer
+Pecks'. When it came to paying for the night's board and lodging there
+was no money--all left in Cape Town. "We'll paint you a signboard,"
+they said--a Utopian mode of finance to solve the difficulty and pay
+their debt. They must have come from Salisbury Plain, or Farmer Peck
+had, for the signboard portrayed a mild-looking shepherd of a Noah's
+Ark type, gazing over a hill at some fat wooden sheep, grazing in
+emerald grass, and in the background a very English-looking little
+farmhouse with rows of stiff Noah's Ark trees. Quite a premature
+attempt at modern conventional design, inspired by the ideals of "Two
+Years Old" playing at Creation and landscape-gardening in the nursery.
+Here the momentous questions are: whether Mr. and Mrs. Noah, in red
+and blue æsthetic garments of a wondrous purity of line, shall stand
+under perfectly symmetrical trees which are on dear little rounds of
+wood, or whether they shall be dotted over the farm together with
+Shem, Ham, and Japheth, in pure yellow, pink, and green, in close
+proximity to two pink cows, two red geese, two black pigs, and two
+purple horses.'
+
+  [Illustration: AT LAKESIDE, LOOKING TOWARDS CONSTANTIA]
+
+  [Illustration: AT LAKESIDE, LOOKING SOUTH-EAST]
+
+A domesticated sequel to the story of the Flood.
+
+Everyone has played 'Noah,' so everyone will understand the design of
+the poster.
+
+The following verses were painted under the board, springing from the
+same talented and amusing brains, a quaint mixture of English, Dutch,
+and Latin:
+
+     'Multum in parvo, pro bono publico,
+     Entertainment for man and beast all of a row.
+     Lekker kost as much as you please,
+     Excellent beds without any fleas.
+
+     'Nos patriam fugimus now we are here,
+     Vivamus, let us live by selling beer.
+     On donne à boire et à manger ici,
+     Come in and try, whosoever you be.'
+
+In a balloon issuing from the mouth of the gentle shepherd was this
+motto, carrying a deeper philosophy: 'Life's but a journey; let us
+live well on the road, says the gentle shepherd of Salisbury Plain.'
+
+On the opposite side of the road are the ruins of the barracks, a low,
+stone, thatched house in a green field, surrounded by a stone wall.
+
+Anne Barnard drove down at the peril of her life, she thought, to
+Simonstown, or False Bay as it was called, and, passing Muizenberg on
+her way, found the garrison living in huts, and was regaled on boiled
+beef and Constantia wine served by the late steward of the Duke of
+Orleans. 'Un mauvais sujet,' says Lady Anne.
+
+The main road runs at the foot of the mountains, with a railway-line
+and a few yards of beach and rock between it and the sea. The most
+wonderful sea in the world! emerald green, with mauve reefs of rock
+showing through its clearness; sapphire blue towards Simonstown, the
+colour of forget-me-nots sweeping the white crescent of Muizenberg
+sands.
+
+We passed St. James and Kalk Bay, where the steam-trawler was coming
+in like a big brown hen to roost surrounded by all the fishing-boats,
+some still on the horizon, like straggling chickens, flying along with
+their white wings sparkling and fluttering in the sun and south-east
+breeze.
+
+  [Illustration: ON FISHHOEK BEACH, NORDHOEK MOUNTAINS IN DISTANCE]
+
+At Fish Hoek, the dangerous beach of quicksands, the setting sun
+poured through the Kommetje and Noord Hoek Valley, tinting the
+sandhills until they glowed like gigantic opals; the lights swept pink
+over the blue streams running across the beach into the sea, and the
+long line of wave, which rolled in to meet them, made a bank of
+transparent aquamarine before it curled itself on to the shore--thin
+blueness with foam-scalloped edges.
+
+We rounded another mountain corner and came upon Glen Cairn with its
+beach-streams and quarries. Clusters of stone huts, like prehistoric
+dwellings on the mountain slopes, are the homes of the quarrymen.
+Simonstown had begun to consider its nightcap when we rode slowly
+round the last corner. The dark grey cruisers were hardly discernible
+in the dusk; across the bay, on the Hottentot's Holland, a fire
+crawled like a red snake up the mountains; the light on the Roman Rock
+Lighthouse was lit. The gardens of Admiralty House are terraced above
+the sea by a long, low white wall; to the right is an enormous white
+plaster figure of Penelope, the old figure-head from the ship of that
+name, and the unseeing eyes of the watchful Penelope are turned
+towards the decrepit hulk lying a few hundred yards away. Great
+magenta masses of bougainvillæa hid the low house, and soon the
+darkness hid all.
+
+The strains of 'God save the King' from the flagship woke me to the
+day, and an hour later we were riding along the gum-tree avenue into
+the town. The quaint little town was named after Governor Simon Van
+der Stel; before that it was called False Bay, or the Bay of Falso.
+Here for five months, beginning with March, the ships from Table Bay
+would anchor, while for five months Table Bay was given over to
+intolerable gales.
+
+A traveller of the eighteenth century describes the town:
+
+     'Close to the shore of the Bay there are a number of
+     warehouses, in which the provisions are deposited for the
+     use of the East India Company's ships. A very beautiful
+     hospital has been erected here for the crews, and a
+     commodious house for the Governor, who usually comes hither
+     and spends a few days while the ships are lying in the Bay.
+     Commerce draws hither also a great number of individuals
+     from the Cape, who furnish the officers with lodgings.
+     While the latter are here the Bay is exceedingly lively,
+     but as soon as the season permits them to heave up their
+     anchors, it becomes a desert; everyone decamps, and the
+     only inhabitants are a company of the garrison, who are
+     relieved every two months. The vessels which arrive then
+     and have need of provisions are in a dismal situation, for
+     it often happens that the warehouse has been so much
+     drained that it is necessary to bring from Cape Town in
+     carts whatever these new-comers are in want of, and
+     the carriage usually costs an exorbitant price. The hire of
+     a paltry cart is from twenty to thirty dollars a day; I
+     have known of fifty paid for one, and it is to be observed
+     that they can only make one journey in the twenty-four
+     hours.'
+
+  [Illustration: SIMONSTOWN MOUNTAINS, WITH CAPE POINT AND ROMAN ROCK
+   LIGHTHOUSES]
+
+We can nowadays, for the exorbitant price of something more than a
+dollar, run up to Cape Town in less than an hour; but I have heard
+from not too ancient inhabitants wonderful stories of not too long ago
+of how, packed like sardines, parties would drive from Town to
+Simonstown to dance on a gunboat and home again in the dawn, with some
+danger of the wrong tide over the Fish Hoek beach, or of the bad road
+to Wynberg.
+
+In an old book of travels I find the _raison d'être_ for the name
+given to the 'Roman' Rock:
+
+     'The finest fish are caught here, and particularly the
+     Rooman (or Rooiman), that gives its name to the Roman Rock,
+     in the neighbourhood of which it is found in great
+     abundance.'
+
+The Commander of old Simonstown died a millionaire, and his illegal
+dealings seem to have been well known and discussed, as all the
+writers of this time and later speak of it. He had the rank of 'under
+merchant,' and carried on a trade with the foreign vessels, reselling
+necessaries at enormous profit.... 'Mr. Trail (a great rogue),' writes
+Anne Barnard to Melville.
+
+We rode up the Red Hill--a steep roadway up the mountain--and saw a
+precarious-looking aerial car swaying up the mountain-side to the
+Sanatorium and Range. We ultimately passed quite close to the Range on
+the flat top in thick purple heath. We looked north, over the False
+Bay and Noord Hoek Mountains, the Steenbergen, or Tokai Ranges, and
+saw Table Mountain in a coronet of cloud. Across these flat-topped
+ranges, over three hundred years ago, had fled the Hottentots, before
+finding their asylum on the opposite shore--the Hottentot's Holland
+Mountains. The two Passes--the Kloof and the road from the Castle to
+the Flats--were carefully guarded. The Caapmans, Hottentots, and
+Watermen, cattle-thieves, tobacco-thieves, garden-thieves,
+wreck-salvagers, hurried along with their cattle from Hout Bay,
+Chapmans Bay, and Noord Hoek, to Cape Point. The Commander sent
+several parties to hunt them out, and the majority made off over the
+Flats, led by their rascally chief 'Herry.' The lowest of them, the
+Watermen, remained behind, hiding in caves and underwood. One fine day
+Corporal Elias Giero, who, with a considerable force, had wandered for
+days round Hout Bay and the Berghvalleyen, reported that eighteen
+hours' walk from this neighbourhood, almost at the southern end of the
+Cape, he had come upon their camp. It sounds pathetic, this great
+expedition for such a small enemy. They found three reed huts, with
+thirteen men and as many women and children. They were making
+assegais, when their dogs barked, and they fled into the rushes,
+crying out that they were Watermen, and not cattle-stealers. But some
+were recognized by 'men who had felt their assegais,' and the chief
+was captured. The former were killed. The chief and a _ci-devant_
+kitchen-boy refused to walk to the fort, 'and, as it was too difficult
+to carry them, our men brought with them to the fort _their upper
+lips_.' Many of them were recognized as wood and water carriers to the
+garrison at the fort, and their names and aliases are carefully
+recorded--for example: 'Carbinza,' or 'Plat neus'; 'Egutha,' or 'Hoogh
+en Laagh'; 'Mosscha,' or 'Kleine Lubbert'; 'Kaikana Makonkoa';
+'Louchoeve'; 'Orenbare'; 'Diknavel'; and so on. Translated into
+English--those that are translatable--they run: 'Flat-nose,' 'High and
+Low,' 'Quick,' 'Bring,' 'Unweary,' 'Hold him fast,' 'He nearly,' etc.
+
+This is a small bit of history which belongs to Cape Point.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE BLUE SHADOW ACROSS THE FLATS
+
+
+Our ponies met us at Muizenberg, and we crossed the railway-line on to
+the long white beach.
+
+It was Easter Monday, and trainloads of inhabitants swarmed like gaudy
+bees round the bathing-huts. At no other time can one see to better
+advantage the wonderful fusion of races which has gone to the making
+of the population of the Cape Peninsula.
+
+In the shade of one of the small, stationary wooden bathing-houses I
+saw the gardener's family, their colour scheme running through the
+gamut of shades from white to chocolate. The gardener had once had a
+Cockney wife, and his life was ''ell,' so he married Marlie, the
+slightly coloured girl brought up on a German mission-station, who
+made excellent stews, washed his shirts well, and sang Lutheran hymns
+to the children when they howled. There were ancestors, black and
+white, on both sides--and everyone hasn't ancestors.
+
+  [Illustration: TABLE MOUNTAIN FROM RETREAT FLATS]
+
+We passed a wagon-load of Malays in gala dress of silks and
+spangles--our washerwomen--possessing the wondrous Oriental gift
+of elusive speech, which will turn away good Christian wrath. One old
+Malay told us he remembered the days when all the Malays made their
+pilgrimage yearly to the grave of Sheik Joseph. A political prisoner
+of the East India Company, of great wealth and position in the East,
+he was exiled to the Cape, and lived at the mouth of the Eerste River,
+near the farm of the Governor's witty brother, Franz Van der Stel.
+There is a sepulchre which is called the 'Kramat,' or resting-place of
+a holy man. The wanderers of the Flats in those early days would often
+come upon the Sheik and his forty followers galloping across the
+sand-hills. This generation of followers wore suits of neat blue
+serge, and, over the fez, a wide reed hat with a low, pointed crown.
+
+Marinus and I thought it would require a Shakespeare to describe the
+heterogeneous mass we passed through. Pathetic sometimes--a
+knock-kneed clerk from Cape Town, shivering in a new, dark-blue
+bathing suit, vainly trying to acclimatize his pasty-faced offspring
+to the waves. Complexions are hard to keep in South Africa; the sun is
+our master, all-absorbing and requiring all--colour, brain,
+energy--your puny effort of concentration useless against this fierce,
+concentrated mass, this alluring South African sun--Lorelei of the
+South.
+
+The very people here are an example--not one concentrated type.
+Marinus and I soliloquized quietly until we reached the shallow river
+which feeds the Lakeside Vleis (lakes). We avoided the beach and kept
+close up to the sand-dunes, the white sand protected from the tearing
+gales of the 'south-easters' by a network of creeping 'Hottentot fig,'
+a fleshy plant with wonderful bright flowers of every hue, and bearing
+an acquired taste in fruit--a small, dried-up-looking fig.
+
+Tall flowering reeds grow in 'klompjes,'[7] and dotted about are small
+green bushes covered with red berries--'dinna bessies,' the coloured
+folk call them. 'Not much cover for the hippo,' laughed Marinus.
+
+My mind went back with a jerk to the old days of Muizenberg, the
+Mountain of Mice, its cannon buried in the sand, its battle, its fort
+and barracks, the Caapmans, who wandered with their herds over the
+flats and killed sea-cows, or hippo, on the very spot where the
+enterprising boatman of Lakeside had built his café.
+
+'And elephants roamed,' I quoted; 'and always the reflection of Table
+Mountain--always the same blue lotus lilies, and the sand-hills, and
+the blue river flowing across the beach.'
+
+We made for Strandfontein, regaining the beach as the tide was going
+out and we could avoid the quicksands. Strandfontein, a little
+desolate bay boasting one reed-covered house and a celebrated
+beach--celebrated for its shells, huge blue mussels, pale pink
+mussels, daintily carved nautili, and rows and rows of coral and mauve
+fan shells.
+
+  [Illustration: SAND DUNES]
+
+Again we talked of the old 'Company days,' and the wonderful plan of
+Commander Van Riebeek to drain the Liesbeek and the Salt Rivers into
+one big canal which would cut off the peninsula from the mainland,
+and, like the great Wall of Hadrian, would keep the barbarians out,
+away from the Company's freemen growing flax, wheat, and disaffection
+on the swampy flats.
+
+Van Riebeek bewails the impracticability in his journal, which, bound
+in ancient brown leather, and written in heavy Dutch lettering, is
+carefully preserved in Cape Town.
+
+                                           '_February 4, 1656._
+
+     'Dry, calm weather. Riebeeck proceeds to False Bay (roads
+     being favourable), accompanied by a guard of soldiers, to
+     see whether the Canal, proposed by Van Goens, could be made
+     across the Isthmus. Took the river course to see whether it
+     at all approached False Bay. Found that the Sweet River,
+     now Liesbeek, which with the Salt River runs into Table
+     Bay, runs snake-like three or four leagues crosswise over
+     the Isthmus, and at some places appears to be stagnant,
+     forming small lakes, between which low and sandy lands lie,
+     until within a league of certain high sand-hills of False
+     Bay, where it again turns into small streams, which
+     gradually become broader, and form a river of fresh water
+     running further on into a large lake, almost as broad as
+     the Meuse and about two hours on foot in circumference,
+     with deep and brackish water full of sea-cows and
+     sea-horses, and supplied from the downs of False Cape.
+     There was apparently no opening, but the water percolated
+     through the sands. The Lake is still about one and a half
+     hours on foot from the seashore, which is about half an
+     hour's walk broad. The Downs about a league, and so high,
+     that they are almost mountains, twenty or twenty-four
+     behind each other, it would therefore be impossible to cut
+     them through. Besides, there would be lakelets on the
+     Flats, some a quarter, some half a league broad to be cut
+     through. This would also be difficult, because of the rocky
+     ground, as we found the next day, after having spent the
+     night in the veldt. The matter is therefore impossible, and
+     would be useless and most injurious to the Company, as the
+     Canal could not be made so wide and deep as to prevent the
+     natives swimming across with their cattle. In case it is
+     supposed that on this side the passage would be closed to
+     them, it must be borne in mind that a large sheet of water
+     on the south side of False Cape about three hours' walk in
+     circumference, becomes a large dry and salt flat in summer,
+     so that no proper Canal could be pierced through it--as the
+     sand is soft and the downs are high--which latter would
+     continually fill up the channel; thousands of men would be
+     required to keep it open; so that the Company cannot
+     for a moment think of it, as the expense would be enormous
+     in comparison with the advantages derived. _Millions of
+     gold would be required!_ and if finally the work be
+     finished and communication with the natives cut off, it
+     would be absurd to suppose that they could be confined on
+     this side--for the artificial island would have such
+     dimensions that, in order to control it, a large number of
+     men would be required, scattered in the veldt, not a few,
+     but a good many, soldiers.
+
+     'The idea that such a canal would enable the householders
+     to live more securely is hardly worth considering, as those
+     who may choose to live here and there may build stone
+     dwellings sufficiently strong to protect them from the
+     natives. Should such free householders cost the Company so
+     much that soldiers are to be kept for their defence,
+     instead of their assisting the Company?...'
+
+  [Illustration: ON THE SANDHILLS NEAR MUIZENBERG]
+
+We cantered over some small sand-hills, and came down to the plains,
+covered with 'quick' grass, dotted with small yellow protea-bush, tiny
+pink flowers, and scarlet heath called 'erica,' intersected by blue
+pools of water, their surfaces almost covered by a sweet-smelling,
+white waterweed. The Malays gather the flower, 'water-eintje,' and
+curry it or stew it into a thick soup. A narrow, white, sandy pathway
+ran between the pools, and far away, in a blue haze, we saw Table
+Mountain and the Devil's Peak.
+
+Quoting again from the Diary:
+
+                                               '_June 29, 1656._
+
+     'Proceeded to the Flats where Van Goens wished to have
+     canal dug. Find the whole country so inundated with rapid
+     streams that the whole cutting, with redoubts and all,
+     would, if made, be swept away at once. The Flats had become
+     a combination of lakes; the work would therefore at present
+     be left in abeyance.'
+
+The ponies slopped through the wet sand, and ahead lay the big lake
+called Zeekoe Vlei (_i.e._, Sea-Cow Lake), separated from a smaller
+lake, Ronde Vlei, by a narrow isthmus.
+
+Skirting a huge, precipitous mountain of sand, we rode round the vlei,
+disturbing great flocks of heron, gulls, and wild-duck.
+
+Straight up out of a yellow protea-bush flew a brown bird with a dull
+orange-red breast--a wip-poor-will, or, as the coloured people say,
+the 'Christmas bird,' or 'Piet, mij vrouw.' Its call is more surely
+'Piet, mij vrouw' than anything else.
+
+'Do you know Le Vaillant's story?' said Marinus. I did. But Marinus
+loves to tell a story, and he has to listen to many; so I said: 'His
+story of what?' Then Marinus, being a dear, told me the tale:
+
+'Le Vaillant and the faithful Hottentot chief, or Piet, as his master
+called him, were out shooting. Le Vaillant shot and killed a female
+bird. Piet brought up the bird. "Go back, you adorable Hottentot,"
+said the traveller, "to the spot where you found this bird, for surely
+there you will find Monsieur le Mari." The "adorable Piet" began to
+weep; that Baas would excuse him, but this he could not do--never
+could he fire at the male bird. "Go--I insist!" said Le Vaillant. "No,
+no, Baas!" And the astonished Baas listened to the reason: that no
+sooner had Piet shot the female, when the male, to quote the old
+story, "began to pursue him with great fury, continually repeating,
+'Piet, mij vrouw! Piet, mij vrouw!' This, in English, is, 'Piet, my
+wife! Piet, my wife!' Small wonder that Le Vaillant wrote of the
+misjudged, Dutch-ridden Hottentot as being "full of sensibility"!'
+
+The sun had begun to set when we reached the other side of the vlei,
+and a coloured woman, carrying a mass of blue lotus lilies up to Town
+for sale, told us 'we had v-e-ry far way still to go.'
+
+Marinus agreed that it was quite worth a hurried ride home, seeing
+this wonderful kaleidoscope of colouring reflected in the vleis.
+
+The sand-hills around were pink, and over the tops of some appeared
+the purple of the Muizenberg Mountains. In the north were the
+Stellenbosch Mountains, with the Helderberg, in a blaze of red,
+underlined by long patches of shining white sand-hills.
+
+But all the while the great blue shadow of Table Mountain crept over
+the Flats, over the vleis, until we watched it reach the north
+barriers. Slowly the blue mounted, absorbing the flush of sunset,
+reached the summits, and drove the pink into the fleecy, detached
+clouds above; these, like blazing balloons, floated over the bay.
+
+I sat up--to reality.
+
+'I have been lost on these Flats, Marinus, and still remember with
+horror the growing darkness and the interminable miles of sandy road
+and dense wattle plantations. Let us get on.'
+
+So we rode and rode, through the brown rushes, splashing through
+water, over mealie patches, dozens of little German children from the
+tiny farms hidden in low wattle rushing out to see us pass.
+
+On we flew into the darkening blue shadow; behind us, whirlwinds of
+sand rising like white wraiths of pursuing Erlkings; and before, the
+smoke from the Kaffir location near the mouth of the Salt River
+curling into the mist.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[7] _I.e._, clumps.
+
+
+BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
+
+  [Illustration: AT THE HEAD OF FALSE BAY]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cape Peninsula, by Réné Juta
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42737 ***