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.