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.

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.

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:

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.