THE BOSHEUVEL, OR HEN AND CHICKENS HILL
We crossed the river at the bottom of the Bishopscourt gardens, and
found ourselves looking down the long fir avenue, arched as perfectly
as the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Opposite, ran another little avenue
along the side of the hill, and to the right, staring at us like black
and white toadstools of monstrous size out of the green gloom, the
thatched cottages of Bishopscourt.
We chose a little narrow pathway running up the hill from the middle
avenue, winding through low protea-bush and silver-trees.
[Illustration: SILVER TREES AND WILD GERANIUMS]
There is cruel, continuous, silent fighting on this hillside--the
battle between the silver-trees and the firs. The firs, or pines, who
came here last, are creeping, year by year, higher and higher up the
hill; year by year the brave little 'witteboomen' (white trees) are
driven before this strong green army of invaders; soon there will be a
last stand on the hilltop--the survival of the fittest. We shall all
see it; we are seeing it every day of our lives--and will no one
help? The pines are helped by unthinking man in his horrible
materialism--the silver-tree branches are easy to break off, and make
good fuel. Day by day, like a file of gaudy beetles, the dwellers of
'Protea' crawl along our little path and down again to the river huts,
with loaded shoulders, and leave the silver woods leaner.
A hundred years ago Anne Barnard, herself a tree-planter for the
generations to come, talks with satisfaction of 'The Marriage of Miss
Silver-tree and Donald Fir-tops.' Marinus says I am a sentimental
traveller, but it is a distressing end to such a _ménage_ after only
one hundred years! Barrow, the naturalist, speaks of the moth which
feeds on the _Protea argenta_, and suggests turning them to some
account, seeing that it is said to be exactly the same insect which
spins the strong Indian silk called 'Tussach.' Here is an idea of
interest, but that means the protection of the silver-tree. There is
in Cape Town a society for the preservation of objects of national
interest--a slumbering giant of the moment. The protection of natural
objects of national importance and beauty should appear as an
amendment on its syllabus. In France, a fat little bourgeois Ministre
de l'Instruction Publique et des Beaux Arts, or the fatter and more
bourgeois Sous-Préfet of a small town, will run about on any hot day
or any cold day, with all the importance and authority of the State
embodied in his active patriotic French body and his 'red ribbon,' and
behold! 'Messieurs, you would destroy this tree--"tiens!"--destroy the
beauty of France, "je vous demande?" Never, "jamais de la vie!"' The
tree stays. That ancient wall destroying the value of a good building
site--'tant pis!' It remains! 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité'--the New
Rule; but we must perforce worship the Old. Such the snobbism of La
Patrie, La France.
Such is my plea for the shining, Ancient Inhabitants of the Bosheuvel.
Most travellers assert that they are unique, growing in no other part
of the world; and many affirm that they are indigenous. Their
evolution is distinctly traceable in the soft grey silkiness on the
back of the leaves of the large, yellow protea-bush. A careful walk
across the Wynberg hills, and you will come back to report that nearly
every shrub or even quite tiny ground plant is of the protea family,
vastly productive and attractive family, from the yellow giants with
their pink-tipped cousins, the sugar-bushes--the treasure caves of the
bees and tiny, brilliant, green sugar-birds--to the top-heavy white
protea, sometimes painted, like Alice's red rose-tree, a deep crimson.
Some very distant cousins, who have not risen sufficiently high in
their world, have no flowers at all, only brilliant-coloured red and
yellow stem tops.
We have seen the Bosheuvel in many moods and seasons; we have been
there when the sweet-smelling pink flower, half acacia, half pea, the
Keurboom, lines the paths, and Bishopscourt lies in a deep blue sea of
mist, while above, the 'Skeleton' and 'Window' Gorges are mauve with
aching buds of the oaks in early spring. Now it is middle summer, with
fields of yellow mustard flower, tall blue reeds, and wild-geraniums,
of which it is said that 'this tribe of plant alone might imitate in
their leaves every genus of the vegetable world.'
Our ponies crackled their way over the dead silver leaves as we
climbed over this old outpost hill, from whose summit the agitated
freemen or soldiers would see the 'Caapmen' dancing round their fires
below. The hill has a fighting reputation; terrible murders of slaves
and burghers and cattle-thieving were daily recorded from the vicinity
of the Bosheuvel in the first Commander's journal. Van Riebeek,
walking up from his farm below, saw 'Kyekuyt,' his second outpost,
burning away to the tune of this Hottentot singing; saw the Saldanhas
pressing close to its base, forming one long ominous barrier along the
blue shadow. His mind was full of tricks for peace. By a clever ruse
he turned these savages with their herds through the Kloof Nek, hoping
they might wander away to Cape Point. But they hurried back over the
Constantia or Wynberg Pass, and their cattle fed with the Company's
cattle, and they danced once again on the 'Hen and Chickens,' whose
grey granite boulders, several small rocks clustering round a big one,
would form fit temples for these worshippers of the moon.
When we reached the famous 'Grey Hen' overlooking the Wynberg Park,
Marinus produced a small piece of paper, and read from it this scheme
of peace, signed in full by the Council and the Commander,
recommending their decision to the grace of God and the approval of
Amsterdam: 'That not only should the Colony be protected from the
ravages of the Hottentots by the redoubts placed at intervals along
the river, with the last and farthest on the Bosheuvel, called "Hout
den Bul" (Hold the Bull), but a fence of bitter almonds should be
planted across the Bosheuvel, stretching to the bottom and then going
off at a direct angle along the river lands to the seashore.'
On our way along the river we have behaved with more inquisitiveness
than respect; most unsuspecting people have had their gardens and
fields incautiously explored by Marinus and me. Here and there we have
found in the overgrown garden of a thatched house, in a tangle of
oleanders (or Chinese roses, as the Dutch call them)--and goodness
knows they are the only flowers that can possibly account for the
floral decorations on old China--myrtle hedges, Cape jasmine, and
magnolias (can't you smell the garden?), a few little clumps of the
shining, green bitter almond, the last of the old fence.
It is not, however, hard to find on the Bosheuvel Hill, though it is
always being destroyed in the bush fires so frequent on the hill, when
in a few minutes hundreds of trees have given one sharp crackle of
agony, and are charred heaps of silvery ashes. We traced it, this old
warrior of a hedge which was once the only shade for the horsemen and
soldiers stationed at the Redoubt. It crosses the middle of the hill.
It once looked on one side on the farm of the Commander, and on the
other side on the huts and kraals of the Hottentots, whose erring
cattle poked their uncivilized horns through its thick greenness; and
now its aged branches lap over a barbed-wire fence which runs along
the farms Oosterzee and Glen Dirk, of Mr. Philip Cloete and his
brother; while, on the other side, the firs and oaks hide the white
walls of Bishopscourt. The silver-tree and the bitter-almond hedge are
the Ancient Inhabitants, and Marinus and I felt we were friends and in
league with the barbed-wire fence, and we hated the position.
So we rode down the hill into the Wynberg Park, and leaving the camp
on the left we crossed the glen at the bottom of Glen Dirk, and,
behold, we were in a sea of vineyards, the purple bunches almost
resting their ripe weight on the burning pink earth.
Some old naturalist thinks that it is to the laziness of the old
vine-growers that we owe the slow evolution of our wine. No tall
trellised vines or standards of France and Spain and the Rhine, no
rows of mulberry-trees supporting the hanging tendrils as in Italy,
but low, stubby-looking little vine-sticks; and, says my authority of
a hundred years ago, 'as is well known, the exhalations from the earth
are so much imbibed by the leaves of the tobacco plant which grow
nearest to it, that those leaves are always rejected as unfit for use,
so it is natural to suppose that the fruit of the vine hanging very
near to, or even resting upon, the ground, will also receive the
prevailing flavour exhaling from the soil.' This was the theory of a
theorist. I have the authority of a wine-maker who says that it is not
only the heavy spring winds that have necessitated low vines, but that
the Cape wine was, and is, essentially a sweet wine, and to procure
the right amount of sugar it is important to grow the vines as near
the ground as possible, that the radiation of the sun off the ground
may ripen them. Later came the demand for a lighter wine, and creeping
vines were introduced grown on wire, but as close to the ground as
possible, otherwise the wine does not maintain itself, and becomes
acid. The old Pontac vine, which is a creeper by nature, was treated
in the old days, and is still treated as a creeper, by tying a long
cane across the centre of the tree, so that it lies horizontally
across, close to the ground; no wire is used, or the days of sweet
Pontac would be over.
My first authority, the theorist, deplores, in excellent English, the
slackness that existed in the making of wine and brandy. I remember
with horror seeing in Constantia cellars the old process in full
swing. Huge vats--the hugeness of a fairy-tale ogre's bath--raised
high up in the gloom of the cellar, the sickening smell of
fermentation, the squash, squash, bubble, bubble, of the juice oozing
through the vat holes, and the sweating blacks, in tunics that reached
to the knee and were once white, treading and squashing the grapes,
their black faces bobbing up and down in the great vats, sometimes
singing, or spitting out the chewed tobacco, the Nirvana of the
workers. My whole body and soul revolted against this physical
strength and stench--to me it was the greatest weapon in the total
abstainer crusade; the nauseous odour of malt and beer is nothing to
it.
Oh! it's a fascinating subject, this culture of the Vine, as old as
the hills, and with the greatest sympathy do the Jew and the Gentile
view it; and its cosmopolicy is almost perfect. It makes brothers of
strangers, swine of brothers; it is an everlasting monument to
Adam--he went out of Paradise to till the ground, and wherefore till
unless to grow the vine which alone can make him forget Paradise--and
in its long pageant come passing by, old Noah and his sons, who
peopled the earth; Dionysius and his followers--his troupe of
Bacchantes revelling in leopard skins, purple grapes and flowing hair,
and in turn their ghastly following of fauns and satyrs, the chorus
for their appalling rites and festivals; then comes the solemn
Persian, whose women carried the purple wine while he sang the praises
of both, in the guise of the philosophy of the most ancient Abyssinian
Universities; in great disorder crowd along the poisoners of early
Rome and the Renaissance, carrying their fatal goblets; the decadent
revellers of Lemnos in artistic drunkenness--roses and pearls and wine
and the heated dancers of inspiration, which made luxury to be
desired. In the crowd, jostling with all, pass Popes and Cardinals
with more wine--strange vicissitude! The Host of the Lord followed by
the faithful--it is now become the religion of the world. Then come
the painters, the great 'primitives,' and the makers of the new
religion, creators of sublime pictures--a 'Last Supper'; the wine in
the cup, pure red, as red as the wine Bacchus is flinging over his
drunken followers, as red as the wine of Omar, of Cleopatra's
love-philtres dissolving pearls. Great Fellowship of the Vine; it
rules the world! Continue looking: there is more procession;
picturesque, besatined men who have fought picturesque duels, and
gambled and drunk wine in the coffee-houses (what a paradox!), men who
have made poems and books, and run States and Empires, and have laid
with unflagging regularity under their tables in the respectability
which rank and custom made possible; and looming in the gloom behind
the pageant are the shadows of the invading army. They, too, have kept
their pattern in this kaleidoscope; the men who have made a Hell for
the drunkards--the Ironsides, Calvinists, Protestants, a dull crowd to
follow such gorgeousness. The Banners of Temperance are Grey and
Green: and grey is an enduring colour, and clashes with nothing; and
green is the colour of the World! the Earth! and the woods! leaves and
pure water! the singing of birds! time to sleep, time to eat, time to
listen! This may be behind the grey banners; but the Eyes of the
Pageant are near-sighted and tired with overmuch colour and vibration,
and the Ears of the Pageant are tuned too high to hear the song of
birds.
We have been round the Mulberry Bush, round and round....
'This is the way we have brushed our hair;
This is the way we have washed our faces;
This is the way we have eaten our food;
This is the way we go to bed;
This is the way we get up again.'
All the cynical philosophy of that child-game brings us back to where
we started--the vineyards.
I told all this to Marinus as we lazed along the path through the
vineyards, with Klastenbosch Woods on our right and tiny thatched
farms with a symmetrical patch of cabbages and violets supporting each
household: the slopes of the Tokai or Steenbergen ranges before us,
'Un paysage après Claud.'
Constantia was once divided into two big plots--Great and Little--and
a few things in between which didn't count much.
Now--well, there are such pretty names; old Klastenbosch, its
outhouses dying in their old faith, with dilapidated Dutch white and
green and low stoeps, while the dwelling-house flaunts its regenerated
walls in newly-acquired glory, full of comfortable English
furniture--the fullest example of the new South African nation, in
ideals laid down by a clever man--_enfin!_ what could be more solid
than such combination? English, Dutch, and German. But the
Klastenbosch pigs are still black, and they grunt and nozzle in the
oak forest and along the stream with the wild olive-trees on its banks
_comme autrefois_. To continue the list of names. Just below us in a
poplar forest lies 'Belle Ombre'; to our left is 'Alphen'; and we
trotted past its gates and low white walls, along the avenue of
twisted, red-dusted stone-pines, past 'Hauptville,' a tiny spot in the
midst of its acres of vines, and up the pink, pine-edged Constantia
road to Groot Constantia.
[Illustration: FIR AVENUE--ALPHEN]