“Here roses load the Christmas air with sweetness, and May ushers in the snow upon the mountains.
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.—Sonnet.
“Here April is in the ‘sear and yellow.’
“Yesterday a furnace-blast swooped down upon us from the great deserts to the north, and I feel I shall never be myself while I continue to see my shadow at noonday projected southward. But enough of grumbling for the present.
“Nowhere have I seen such starlight as streams upon the earth from the Milky Way, which belts the whole heavens here with silver. I don’t know why I have never seen the Milky Way so distinct and splendid in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the glory of the South African nights, and I have the pleasure, too, of seeing the entire sweep of the ‘Scorpion’s’ tail, superb scroll of blazing stars. I knew the Southern Cross would be disappointing, and so was not disappointed.
“It gyrates over the Pole in a way to greatly astonish the uninitiated. The other evening, dressing for an evening function, I saw it before my window upright, and on coming home in the small hours, behold it on its head!
“I cannot hope ever to convey to the mind of those who have not experienced Cape Colony the extraordinarily powerful local feeling of these days and nights. Melancholy they are—at least to me—but most, most beautiful and pungently poetical. The aromatic quality of the odours that permeate the air suggests that word. Yet all is too strange to win the heart of a newcomer, however much his eyes and mind may be captivated.
“If an artist wanted to accomplish that apparently impossible feat of painting Fairyland direct from Nature, without one touch supplied out of his own fancy, he would only have to come here. There are effects of light and colour on these landscapes that I never saw elsewhere. The ordinary laws seem set aside. For instance, you expect a palm-tree to tell dark against the sunset. Oh, dear me no, not necessarily here. I saw one a tender green, and the sand about it was in a haze of softest rose-colour, through which shone the vivid orange light of the sunset behind it. Incredible altogether are the colours at sunset, but all so fleeting. And there is no after-glow here as in Egypt and Italy; the instant the glory of the setting sun is gone all is over and all is grey.
“Even the melancholy-quaint sound of the frogs through the night suggests fairy tales. It is appealing in its own way. I thought the Italian maremma frog noisy, but no one can imagine what an orgy of shrill croaking fills the nights here. They are everywhere, these irrepressibles, though invisible; near your head, far away, under your feet, at your side, in the tree-tops, in the streams, for ever springing their rattles with renewed zest. I shall never hear nocturnal frogs again without being transported to these regions of strange and melancholy nights.
“Table Mountain rises square and precipitous above our garden, far above the simmer of the frogs, and looks like an altar in the pure white light that falls upon it from the Milky Way. How still, how holy in its repose of the long ages it looks, and the thought comes to one’s mind, ‘Would that all the evil brought to South Africa by the finding of the gold could be gathered together and burnt on that altar as a peace offering!’