We climbed down the gorge through an aromatic hedge of shrub and tall red gladiolus and royal blue agapanthus, until we came to a projecting cliff, called 'Lover's Leap,' which has the romantic and tragic tradition that its name implies. Instead of being overpowered by its tragedy and its height, I sat down on a sun-warmed rock, and so closely in our souls are the praises of all religions allied, that, stirred by the pureness of the air, the blueness of the distances, the sea before me and the distance of the world below, I unconsciously quoted the words which are written by Walt Whitman in that creed of the vagrant philosopher, the 'Song of the Open Road': 'The efflux of the Soul is happiness; here is happiness; I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times.
'Now it flows unto us: we are rightly charged; the earth never tires.
'I swear to you that there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.'
Sunday, January 30, 1910.
I have spent the morning in the fir-woods which fringe the dams. Through a dip in the mountains facing east, I see the blue peaks of the Hottentot's Holland Ranges. A trolley brought me and my books down from the house on the rock, and I walked up the 'Kitchen Gorge' to find an old Hottentot cattle kraal—the grey rocks covered with lichen—and close beside it, on the side of the mountain, a concave rock big enough to hold six herds. Just above us the famous 'Echo' Valley, where Anne Barnard, having discarded many pairs of pattens, called on her party to drink the health of His Majesty King George, 'not doubting that all the hills around would join us: "God save the King—God save great George our King!" roared I and my troop. "God save—God save—God save—great George—great George—great George our King!" echoed the loyal mountains.'
Anne was almost the first woman to climb up the mountain, and there was pretty heavy betting against it in the town.
Among her party was one of the pleasantest, best-informed, and most eager-minded young men in the world—a Mr. Barrow, a naturalist and explorer, who was employed by the Governor, Lord Macartney, to report on the Colony, and especially its unexplored territory. Barrow wrote a life of Lord Macartney and a two-volume book of travels in Africa, in which it is amusing to trace the way of all explorers—the casting of dark doubts on the writing of those who have been before. Le Vaillant dismissed the disgraceful old gossiper Kolbé in a few well-timed words: 'The Residence of this man at the Cape is not yet forgotten. It is well known that he never quitted the town, yet he speaks with all the assurance of an eyewitness. It cannot, however, be doubted that, after an abode of ten years, having failed to accomplish what he was commissioned to do, he found it much easier to collect all the tipplers of the Colony, who, treating him with derision whilst they were drinking his wine, dictated memoirs to him from tavern to tavern, tried who could relate to him the most absurd and ridiculous anecdotes, and amused him with information until they had drained his bottles. In this manner are new discoveries made, and thus is the progress of the human mind enlarged!'
In turn Barrow treats Monsieur Le Vaillant in like manner. For while visiting some years later the farm on which Le Vaillant killed some tigers with so much éclat and danger that a few pages are devoted to the feat, Barrow hears a very different story at the famous house of Slabert in the Groen Kloof. The family knew Le Vaillant well, and Mr. Barrow read his travels aloud, to the intense amusement of the Slaberts. Barrow says in his book: '... But the whole of his transactions in this part of the country, wherein his own heroism is so fully set forth, they assert to be so many fabrications'; that the celebrated tiger-shoot was done entirely by their own Hottentots' trap-gun; and that the gay Le Vaillant found the animal expiring under a bush, and, with no great danger to himself, discharged his musket into the dying tiger! Le Vaillant had set out to find a barbarous race said to wear cotton clothing. His first book of travels in the East had sold well, and here in Africa Kolbe's imagination had left little scope for improvement; hence these revilings.
Disa Head, Table Mountain,
January 31.
There was no sunrise this morning; a driving mist and a howling, black south-easter. 'Table Mountain has put on its peruke,' says the witty Le Vaillant, so there will be no fir-woods or flower-hunting this morning; and I am sitting in a small office. Through the windows, in the minutes between the mists, I can see the blue Indian Ocean and Hout Bay, and the tallest heads of the Twelve Apostles Mountains, or 'Casteelbergen' as they used to be called. Every hour it grows clearer, and the wind keeps the clouds high up, their great dark shadows flying across the grey rocks like a defeated army of Erlkings. A big bird battling against the gale in the Disa Valley reminds one of the story told by some old traveller, who states that, when the south-east wind blew very strongly, whole swarms of vultures were swept down from the mountain into the streets of Cape Town, where the inhabitants killed them, like locusts, with big sticks!