The old road from Wynberg to Muizenberg is no longer traceable. I imagine it started from Waterloo Green, as all old Wynberg was centred round the hill. A convent stands back from the green, but, like the poem in the story of 'Through the Looking-Glass,' if you look again you will see it isn't a convent at all, but the old Wynberg homestead, one of the early grants of land to a freeman, the home of Mynheer Cloete.

Wynberg hides its archives in overgrown gardens of oleander, wild-olive, blue plumbago hedges, cool white gardenias and red hibiscus flowers, cypress-trees and date-palms, brought from the East by retired soldiers from India, with large livers and small pensions, making their curries and their chutneys in the little thatched bungalows of old Wynberg. To one of these, still standing and acting as a stable to a big white house in the oak avenue which we fancy is part of the old road, came Wellington on his way to India, and gave his name to the avenue. On our way along the main road to Muizenberg we passed a renovated homestead, probably one of the old rest-houses, now used as a convalescent home, but its gardens are full of old-world memories, willows, and myrtle-hedge, and arbours of strange trees, bent and twisted into fantastic coolnesses.

There is a dull stretch of wattled road running through Plumstead, Diep River, and Retreat. At Diep River the flooded lands grow potatoes, at Plumstead they grow vegetables, all in amongst the wildness of the big plain covered with vleis and protea-bush and purple and crimson heath. The Retreat is historical. It lies on the Cape Town side of the Muizenberg Mountains, which seem to spring up in granite and green from the sea. A narrow strip of land at their base spoils the illusion—'The ThermopylÆ of the Cape,' says an old enthusiast some hundred years ago. Through the narrow pass between the sea and mountains retreated the famous Burgher Cavalry, abandoning their position at Muizenberg before the guns of the America. But history, I fancy, regards the Battle of Muizenberg more as a diplomatic coup than as a serious fight. Even the cannon-balls, which are dotted along the road from Kalk Bay to Muizenberg, are ending their uneventful days in seaside peace, and their resting-places in soft sand speak of further diplomacy.

Near Lakeside are several old farms with lost identity. Over the hill, leaving the lovely vleis behind us, we came upon Muizenberg, from an architectural point of view the saddest sight in the world; here are two old landmarks, the one so renovated that it is almost unrecognizable, the other a ruin. The first was a low, whitewashed, thatched homestead—an old inn, or rest-house, as the Dutch called it—and it was named 'Farmer Pecks.' The oldest inhabitant cannot tell why, but I remember the original building with its celebrated signboard. The story of the signboard is as follows: 'Two middies, many, many years ago, returning to Simonstown from Cape Town, where they had been on a jaunt, arrived one dark night at Muizenberg. It was a twenty-mile walk—twenty miles along a difficult track, across a dangerous beach of quicksands (Fish Hoek), and they were travelling on foot, because very few people could afford a cart. It was too late and too dark to continue their journey, so they had to put up at Farmer Pecks'. When it came to paying for the night's board and lodging there was no money—all left in Cape Town. "We'll paint you a signboard," they said—a Utopian mode of finance to solve the difficulty and pay their debt. They must have come from Salisbury Plain, or Farmer Peck had, for the signboard portrayed a mild-looking shepherd of a Noah's Ark type, gazing over a hill at some fat wooden sheep, grazing in emerald grass, and in the background a very English-looking little farmhouse with rows of stiff Noah's Ark trees. Quite a premature attempt at modern conventional design, inspired by the ideals of "Two Years Old" playing at Creation and landscape-gardening in the nursery. Here the momentous questions are: whether Mr. and Mrs. Noah, in red and blue Æsthetic garments of a wondrous purity of line, shall stand under perfectly symmetrical trees which are on dear little rounds of wood, or whether they shall be dotted over the farm together with Shem, Ham, and Japheth, in pure yellow, pink, and green, in close proximity to two pink cows, two red geese, two black pigs, and two purple horses.'

A domesticated sequel to the story of the Flood.

Everyone has played 'Noah,' so everyone will understand the design of the poster.

The following verses were painted under the board, springing from the same talented and amusing brains, a quaint mixture of English, Dutch, and Latin:

In a balloon issuing from the mouth of the gentle shepherd was this motto, carrying a deeper philosophy: 'Life's but a journey; let us live well on the road, says the gentle shepherd of Salisbury Plain.'

On the opposite side of the road are the ruins of the barracks, a low, stone, thatched house in a green field, surrounded by a stone wall.

Anne Barnard drove down at the peril of her life, she thought, to Simonstown, or False Bay as it was called, and, passing Muizenberg on her way, found the garrison living in huts, and was regaled on boiled beef and Constantia wine served by the late steward of the Duke of Orleans. 'Un mauvais sujet,' says Lady Anne.

The main road runs at the foot of the mountains, with a railway-line and a few yards of beach and rock between it and the sea. The most wonderful sea in the world! emerald green, with mauve reefs of rock showing through its clearness; sapphire blue towards Simonstown, the colour of forget-me-nots sweeping the white crescent of Muizenberg sands.

We passed St. James and Kalk Bay, where the steam-trawler was coming in like a big brown hen to roost surrounded by all the fishing-boats, some still on the horizon, like straggling chickens, flying along with their white wings sparkling and fluttering in the sun and south-east breeze.

At Fish Hoek, the dangerous beach of quicksands, the setting sun poured through the Kommetje and Noord Hoek Valley, tinting the sandhills until they glowed like gigantic opals; the lights swept pink over the blue streams running across the beach into the sea, and the long line of wave, which rolled in to meet them, made a bank of transparent aquamarine before it curled itself on to the shore—thin blueness with foam-scalloped edges.

We rounded another mountain corner and came upon Glen Cairn with its beach-streams and quarries. Clusters of stone huts, like prehistoric dwellings on the mountain slopes, are the homes of the quarrymen. Simonstown had begun to consider its nightcap when we rode slowly round the last corner. The dark grey cruisers were hardly discernible in the dusk; across the bay, on the Hottentot's Holland, a fire crawled like a red snake up the mountains; the light on the Roman Rock Lighthouse was lit. The gardens of Admiralty House are terraced above the sea by a long, low white wall; to the right is an enormous white plaster figure of Penelope, the old figure-head from the ship of that name, and the unseeing eyes of the watchful Penelope are turned towards the decrepit hulk lying a few hundred yards away. Great magenta masses of bougainvillÆa hid the low house, and soon the darkness hid all.

The strains of 'God save the King' from the flagship woke me to the day, and an hour later we were riding along the gum-tree avenue into the town. The quaint little town was named after Governor Simon Van der Stel; before that it was called False Bay, or the Bay of Falso. Here for five months, beginning with March, the ships from Table Bay would anchor, while for five months Table Bay was given over to intolerable gales.

A traveller of the eighteenth century describes the town:

We can nowadays, for the exorbitant price of something more than a dollar, run up to Cape Town in less than an hour; but I have heard from not too ancient inhabitants wonderful stories of not too long ago of how, packed like sardines, parties would drive from Town to Simonstown to dance on a gunboat and home again in the dawn, with some danger of the wrong tide over the Fish Hoek beach, or of the bad road to Wynberg.

In an old book of travels I find the raison d'Être for the name given to the 'Roman' Rock:

The Commander of old Simonstown died a millionaire, and his illegal dealings seem to have been well known and discussed, as all the writers of this time and later speak of it. He had the rank of 'under merchant,' and carried on a trade with the foreign vessels, reselling necessaries at enormous profit.... 'Mr. Trail (a great rogue),' writes Anne Barnard to Melville.

We rode up the Red Hill—a steep roadway up the mountain—and saw a precarious-looking aerial car swaying up the mountain-side to the Sanatorium and Range. We ultimately passed quite close to the Range on the flat top in thick purple heath. We looked north, over the False Bay and Noord Hoek Mountains, the Steenbergen, or Tokai Ranges, and saw Table Mountain in a coronet of cloud. Across these flat-topped ranges, over three hundred years ago, had fled the Hottentots, before finding their asylum on the opposite shore—the Hottentot's Holland Mountains. The two Passes—the Kloof and the road from the Castle to the Flats—were carefully guarded. The Caapmans, Hottentots, and Watermen, cattle-thieves, tobacco-thieves, garden-thieves, wreck-salvagers, hurried along with their cattle from Hout Bay, Chapmans Bay, and Noord Hoek, to Cape Point. The Commander sent several parties to hunt them out, and the majority made off over the Flats, led by their rascally chief 'Herry.' The lowest of them, the Watermen, remained behind, hiding in caves and underwood. One fine day Corporal Elias Giero, who, with a considerable force, had wandered for days round Hout Bay and the Berghvalleyen, reported that eighteen hours' walk from this neighbourhood, almost at the southern end of the Cape, he had come upon their camp. It sounds pathetic, this great expedition for such a small enemy. They found three reed huts, with thirteen men and as many women and children. They were making assegais, when their dogs barked, and they fled into the rushes, crying out that they were Watermen, and not cattle-stealers. But some were recognized by 'men who had felt their assegais,' and the chief was captured. The former were killed. The chief and a ci-devant kitchen-boy refused to walk to the fort, 'and, as it was too difficult to carry them, our men brought with them to the fort their upper lips.' Many of them were recognized as wood and water carriers to the garrison at the fort, and their names and aliases are carefully recorded—for example: 'Carbinza,' or 'Plat neus'; 'Egutha,' or 'Hoogh en Laagh'; 'Mosscha,' or 'Kleine Lubbert'; 'Kaikana Makonkoa'; 'Louchoeve'; 'Orenbare'; 'Diknavel'; and so on. Translated into English—those that are translatable—they run: 'Flat-nose,' 'High and Low,' 'Quick,' 'Bring,' 'Unweary,' 'Hold him fast,' 'He nearly,' etc.

This is a small bit of history which belongs to Cape Point.