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.
A SUNSET ON THE LION'S HEAD: EFFECT OF SOUTH-EAST WIND