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.'