THE MOUNTAIN
To realize the Cape Peninsula one must stand on the lower plateau of
Table Mountain, near the Wynberg Reservoir: there is a clear, neat map
of the country laid out before one.
We drove up over the Hen and Chickens Hill, the road running parallel
with the old bitter-almond Hedge to the teak-gated enclosure on the
'Rhodes Road.'
It was a misty morning, though the sun was hot; the Flats were mostly
in shade, with long shafts of light striking across the sand-dunes and
the 'vleis.'
A trolley, dragged by a white horse, brought us through a grove of
silver-trees to a tin shed, where a coolie half-caste told us that we
should have to wait for the mountain trolley, which was then running
up coal and food to the workers at the reservoir on the mountain above
us.
[Illustration: CONSTANTIA VALLEY AND FALSE BAY, WITH CAPE POINT]
The thin mist crept up and down the slopes, and hordes of black
flower-pickers passed us, carrying huge bunches of pink and
purple flowers, gathered from the Skeleton and Window Gorges, to be
sold next morning in Adderley Street.
A small black trolley, with planks across the top to serve as seats,
slipped through a clump of gum-trees, stopped at the shed, and we
climbed in. The damp mists crept lower, and Marinus lent me his big
black mackintosh. The trolley was hauled up the one-in-one gradient by
a rope worked by steam. Running from the front of the car to the iron
bar at the back of it was a small piece of dilapidated-looking rope,
the object of which I could not imagine. Slowly we climbed through the
gum-trees, and came face to face with the grey wall of mountain
towering before us.
The rays of sun caught the silver-trees below, and they flashed their
farewells as we mounted into the mists. On our right were slopes of
pale pink gladioli and gentian-blue flowering reed. On our left,
clumps of scarlet-red 'Erica' heath and brown grasses, and
far--terribly far--below us the Rhodes Road winding close to the
mountain over Constantia Nek.
Suddenly I felt the rope tighten, and instinctively (no need to ask
its use now) found myself clinging and crouching forward with a tense
feeling in my throat.
The mountain seemed almost to hang over the car, yet the line went
straight up.
I smelt the pungent scent of wild-geraniums, and knew there were pink
flowers, but my eyes saw not.
The rope slackened, and I looked back!
I understood why Lot's wife became a pillar of salt: we had come up
over the edge of the world.
Once, like a reassuring presence, a small black car ran down past the
trolley, almost brushing my coat.
Twelve minutes of this, then before us were iron sheds and black and
white genii--the men who had made the line and the men who worked the
trolley. Inside the shed the puffing little engine of magic power.
Then the 'man who makes' on the mountain hurried us off, through a
forest of thin firs, on to a plain of rock and white sand, with not
more than ten feet of view around.
It was a mysterious walk, this pilgrimage in silence through the
rain--soft, soaking stuff of spray--past huge water-worn boulders,
grey granite gargoyles that peered at us through the fog. No sound but
the noise of our footsteps on the damp white pathway, and the crunch
of small pebbles as we passed between grey walls of rock.
Suddenly the way became a field of mauveness, palest pink and purple
flowers, hedged by masses of tall, yellow, flowering reeds, while
close to the damp earth grew hundreds of sweet-smelling
butter-coloured orchids and white crassula.
As we watched our phantom party moving through the flowers in their
unpractical garments, Marinus reminded me of how Anne Barnard had
climbed this mountain in scanty skirt, her husband's trousers, and
pattens. The memory of Anne made me sing something Scotch--not her own
song, 'Robin Gray,' but 'Loch Lomond.' I sang very softly to suit the
mists, elusive spirits with feathery wings.
As I sang there came a noise of driven waters, the clouds moved away,
and before us was a lake: a great ocean it might have been, for one
saw no farther shore, but only big angry waves dashing against the
rocks.
The 'man who made things' took us down the bank and led us on to a
huge wall with a cement pathway and a thin iron rail.
On one side of the water, a sheer drop of over a hundred feet, a drop
into ferns and creepers and gorgeous greenness. On the other side,
sixty feet across, were the wind-driven waters of the big Cape Town
reservoir, and the clever fingers of the 'man who made' pointed into
the mist to where there was another of those caged seas, 'The highest
dam in Africa--in all Africa,' he said, with some suspicion of
satisfaction in his voice.
Big waves splashed over the stone wall, and through the mist we heard
a dog bark from the caretaker's cottage across the water.
A DIARY FROM DISA HEAD, TABLE MOUNTAIN.
DISA HEAD, TABLE MOUNTAIN,
_January 29, 1910_.
A small Norwegian Pan is sitting on a big grey rock beside me as I
write; he is a Christian, civilized imp by birth, and his name is Olaf
Tafelberg Thorsen, and he is a Viking by descent. He is round and
brown as one of the little pebbles that lie on the white shores of the
big blue dams, and his eyes are like the blue-brown pools that are in
the shadow of the 'Disa Gorge.' This world, which I had only seen
through the grey mists, is sparkling in the perfect atmosphere of some
2,000 feet above the sea.
The same trolley I have spoken of before ran me and my baggage up the
Wynberg side of the mountain. On top I was met by its inventor and the
father of Olaf Tafelberg, and we formed a procession, to walk for
three-quarters of an hour to this home on the grey rock above the dam,
where months before I had heard a dog bark out of the mist.
Olaf Tafelberg has a Viking brother, Sigveg, fair and blue-eyed, who
knows every flower on the mountain. Then there is a girl child with
nothing more distinctive than the most distinctive name of Disa
Narina; but she has the same simpleness of manner as the buxom brown
Lady Narina, beloved by Monsieur Le Vaillant--the 'model for the
pencil of Albano'--'the youngest of the Graces, under the figure of a
Hottentot.' This fascinating Hottentot, whom Le Vaillant met with on
his inland travels, became a kind of dusky and rustic Egeria. But
Narina possessed more morality than morals, and made life very
pleasant for herself, acquiring many fine bracelets and
head-handkerchiefs from her devoted Frenchman, whose 'sentimentality'
induced him to weep over the far-travelled letters of Madame Le
Vaillant, and to be content to see Narina in the capacity of a game
dog who would tramp for miles with him along the banks of the river
Groot-Vis.
But this is a diversion from the small Disa Narina of Table Mountain.
Narina is the Hottentot word for flower, and the flower is a gorgeous
species of lily in every shade of red, pink, and maroon, covered with
shining gold dust. There is a picture by an old Dutch master of the
time of William of Orange, hanging in a room in Hampton Court--dull
pink narinas in a gold vase.
The red grandiflora Disa grows in a deep gully running right through
the mountain. The father of Disa Narina took me into the gorge over
which the great white dam wall towers, and down which 25 to 50 million
gallons of water rush weekly into the thirsty Cape Town reservoirs. We
watched it dashing and splashing out of its narrow valve pipe down
this steep ravine with towering, fern-covered cliffs on either side,
down into the soft blue distance, where it rushes through a tunnel,
and is lost from sight. Poor water! to leave those lovely blue lakes
for dusty Cape Town; no wonder it grumbles and foams all the long
length of the Disa Gorge. Some of it escapes--for a rest--into the
dark brown pools that lie round the low tree-roots in the shadow of
the dripping fern cliffs.
I climbed along some fallen boughs into the coolness to pick the fern,
which is a bright pink colour where it grows in the shadow. High above
I saw the crimson disa and terracotta heath, and, edging the pathway,
a pure mauve flower and gentian-blue lobelia, the ancestor of that
little blue border for English flower-beds. The first lobelia emigrant
left the Cape in 1660, and arrived to find London almost too busy
welcoming a new-old King to worry very much about its little Colonial
blueness. Still, it has found a certain rural fame, and has returned
to the land of its birth; but its mountain brothers, who are citizens
of the world, would wonder at its small size.
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!
The world is showing itself now, but all looks cowed and dominated by
the fury of the wind. A mad game this--wind and clouds in league,
making a sun-proof roof, with only the noise of the gale, the splash
of the driven waters in the dams below, and the bells of the goats
walking round the house in the fog.
[Illustration: A SUNSET ON THE LION'S HEAD: EFFECT OF SOUTH-EAST WIND]
THE FIR-WOODS AT DISA HEAD.
I have seen the kingdoms of the world, and am satisfied--a wondrous
state of mind and body! I have sat on a ledge of crassula-covered rock
and looked down upon Cape Town--Lion's Head far below us, the green
slopes scarred by innumerable red roads, the bay clear and calm
beneath us, and a gentle south-east breeze with the coolness of water
behind us. To the north, line upon line of low hills swimming in blue
haze, the farms of Malmesbury showing up like little white beacons in
the plains; to our left the Platt Klip Gorge, like a great rent in the
grey mountain. My guide, who is a philosopher, started a story--at
least, I thought it was a fairy-tale--of a sanatorium on the flat top
and a railway. 'Cape Town has got that up its sleeve'--I realized that
he really was speaking sense. It will happen, of course, in the
natural order of things; and it will bring the believers and the
unbelievers--those who see and those 'who pick blackberries to stain
their faces'--the cool gorges will echo with their voices, the Disa
will be hedged round with regulations stronger than barbed wire, and
the swampy ground which now grows shiny white pebbles will grow
potatoes and lettuce for the multitude.
In the old journal we have the first record of the climbing of Table
Mountain:
'_Sunday, September 29, 1652._
'Fine day. Our assistants and two others ascended Table
Mountain with the Ottento, who speaks a little English; saw
the fires lit by them; ascent difficult; top of mountain
flat--as broad and three times as long as the Dam of
Amsterdam, with some pools of fresh water.'
The present pool has very little water; but then, it is summer, and we
took the rain gauge for the month and poured back on to the earth
three large drops of water!
Barrow, in his description of the ascent, which he made in the
charming company of the Barnards, talks of the view from the top: 'All
the objects on the plain below are, in fact, dwindled away to the eye
of the spectator into littleness and insignificance. The flat-roofed
houses of Cape Town, disposed into formal clumps, appear like those
paper fabrics which children are accustomed to make with cards. The
shrubbery on the sandy isthmus looks like dots, and the farms and
their enclosures as so many lines, and the more-finished parts of a
plan drawn on paper.'
But we crossed the flat top and came to the Wynberg side: saw the
country, neatly mapped as Barrow says, bathed in sunshine. My guide
has been a sailor, and has travelled round the world, but here he
says: 'Here is the best view in the world!' and he went off to examine
more rain gauges.
It is a wonderful thing to be utterly alone with the earth and the
sun; to become a hill Pantheist, but to realize why, in a hot stone
church, one can get up and sing that the Sun, the Moon, the Air, the
Mountains, and the Earth may bless and praise the Lord.