'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."'

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:

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.'

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the old journal we have the first record of the climbing of Table Mountain: