The Cape Peninsula: Pen and Colour Sketches

by Réné Hansard

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.

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 Phœnicians, 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.

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.

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."'

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.