'June 29, 1656.
'Proceeded to the Flats where Van Goens wished to have canal dug. Find the whole country so inundated with rapid streams that the whole cutting, with redoubts and all, would, if made, be swept away at once. The Flats had become a combination of lakes; the work would therefore at present be left in abeyance.'
The ponies slopped through the wet sand, and ahead lay the big lake called Zeekoe Vlei (i.e., Sea-Cow Lake), separated from a smaller lake, Ronde Vlei, by a narrow isthmus.
Skirting a huge, precipitous mountain of sand, we rode round the vlei, disturbing great flocks of heron, gulls, and wild-duck.
Straight up out of a yellow protea-bush flew a brown bird with a dull orange-red breast—a wip-poor-will, or, as the coloured people say, the 'Christmas bird,' or 'Piet, mij vrouw.' Its call is more surely 'Piet, mij vrouw' than anything else.
'Do you know Le Vaillant's story?' said Marinus. I did. But Marinus loves to tell a story, and he has to listen to many; so I said: 'His story of what?' Then Marinus, being a dear, told me the tale:
'Le Vaillant and the faithful Hottentot chief, or Piet, as his master called him, were out shooting. Le Vaillant shot and killed a female bird. Piet brought up the bird. "Go back, you adorable Hottentot," said the traveller, "to the spot where you found this bird, for surely there you will find Monsieur le Mari." The "adorable Piet" began to weep; that Baas would excuse him, but this he could not do—never could he fire at the male bird. "Go—I insist!" said Le Vaillant. "No, no, Baas!" And the astonished Baas listened to the reason: that no sooner had Piet shot the female, when the male, to quote the old story, "began to pursue him with great fury, continually repeating, 'Piet, mij vrouw! Piet, mij vrouw!' This, in English, is, 'Piet, my wife! Piet, my wife!' Small wonder that Le Vaillant wrote of the misjudged, Dutch-ridden Hottentot as being "full of sensibility"!'
The sun had begun to set when we reached the other side of the vlei, and a coloured woman, carrying a mass of blue lotus lilies up to Town for sale, told us 'we had v-e-ry far way still to go.'
Marinus agreed that it was quite worth a hurried ride home, seeing this wonderful kaleidoscope of colouring reflected in the vleis.
The sand-hills around were pink, and over the tops of some appeared the purple of the Muizenberg Mountains. In the north were the Stellenbosch Mountains, with the Helderberg, in a blaze of red, underlined by long patches of shining white sand-hills.