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.