Sea Point possesses the two best private libraries in the Peninsula. One of them belonged to a great little man, Saul Solomon, of Clarensville, who died some years ago. Public men never live long enough at the Cape to die in the fulness of attainment; ambition and principle go but slowly hand in hand if you would have them travel along the same road, but Saul Solomon's name is high in the annals of politics and principles. The rocks below Clarensville, or probably those larger granite masses beyond the Queen's Hotel, were celebrated fishing-places in the days of the early Commanders; but one short entry thrills one and dissipates the ideal dulness of the gentle art. During the Van Riebeek reign a corporal went fishing for 'klip' fish amongst the brown seaweed which lies like a barren reef round the south-west coast, when a lion wandered down to the beach, and left so little of the angler that nought of him was found but his trousers and his shoes: which we imagine he had discarded, and was not discrimination on the part of the lion.
CAMPS BAY, ON THE VICTORIA ROAD
Marinus and I climbed into a green tram which ran along a high mountain road overlooking the lower Victoria Road. We reached Clifton, a little kraal of houses and bungalows, and left the tram and walked down to the lower road through an old farm-garden. The steep slopes of the cliff down to the sea were covered with brilliant green shrub and purple flowers. Strolling along, we came upon Camps Bay, which we fancy was Caapmans Bay; for here the Caapmans, or Hottentots, pastured their flocks during their 'merry-go-round' journeying from the Fort, over the Kloof Nek, along the Casteelbergen, or Twelve Apostles Range, to Hout Bay; then often over the Constantia Nek to worry the outposts on the Bosheuvel, and back to the Fort; or from Hout Bay to Chapmans Bay and Noord Hoek, and on to Cape Point. Their last stronghold was in the Hottentot's Holland Mountains; but in the year 1714 nearly all the tribe were exterminated by the smallpox. Four chiefs remained—'Scipio Africanus,' 'Hannibal,' 'Hercules,' and 'Konja'—who received, says the old chronicle, 'the usual stick with the brass knob,' the insignia of office. Camps Bay gave the old map-makers and Commanders some trouble; but they all found the great line of breakers prevented the bay from being used either for themselves or for the landing of hostile forces.
On the slope of the Lion's Head, above the bay, is a little round white house, the Round House, where Sir Charles Somerset spent his week-ends. Sir Charles, whose reign here was during the end of the eighteenth century, used several of the old homesteads as shooting-boxes.
Marinus, with enormous satisfaction, found a stray taxi, and soon we had passed the 'Oude Kraal' of the watermen on our way to Hout Bay. The turreted tops of the Casteelbergen, or Twelve Apostles Mountains, were 'canopied in blue,' their slopes covered with a bright mauve Michaelmas daisy. The narrow road curves and curls round their sides, and below stretch acres and acres of sea, horizonless, heaving and sinking, blue and green and gold, lapping against the edges of the land in crescent-shaped little bays, or dashing against walls of rock. The cliffs, grass-grown down to the water, are covered with flowers, big clumps of prickly-pear, and blue aloe, every freshly-turned corner more lovely than the last. There is one other road in the world to compare with it, and that road runs along the South of France into Italy; but the waters of the Mediterranean are fade, lifeless waters to the ocean that fringes the Casteelbergen in Africa.
HOUT BAY AND HANGBERG