Réné Hansard

“ So we recovered our ponies from the woodcutter, who told us he had cut wood round 'Paradise' for over thirty years, and followed the red-brick slave-road which brought us to the middle of the Newlands Avenue. 'Paradise,' with its shy ghosts, its decay, its charm, and its memories of Anne, we placed at the back of our minds like little sacred hidden temples, and the essence of it all burnt like incense in their shrines. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ HOUT BAY AND HANGBERG
Far out into the sea stretches a reef of sharp rocks where many ships have found a terrible end: the steep, slippery slopes beyond the little Lion's Head isolate the coast from all assistance.
In front of us a dull green car was swinging round the curves. 'We'll pass her,' said Marinus, who was driving. The road is not wide—just room enough for two cars to pass abreast. The green car saw us coming, and decided we should not pass her. Marinus jerked his head forward, and vowed we should. For ten minutes I sat rigid; my eyes never left a small spot of mud on Marinus' coat. ”

“ Marinus, with enormous satisfaction, found a stray taxi, and soon we had passed the 'Oude Kraal' of the watermen on our way to Hout Bay. The turreted tops of the Casteelbergen, or Twelve Apostles Mountains, were 'canopied in blue,' their slopes covered with a bright mauve Michaelmas daisy. The narrow road curves and curls round their sides, and below stretch acres and acres of sea, horizonless, heaving and sinking, blue and green and gold, lapping against the edges of the land in crescent-shaped little bays, or dashing against walls of rock. ”

“ Somewhere George Eliot says, 'attempts at description are stupid—how can one describe a human being?' The assertion does not apply entirely to human beings. Who but refuses to bear attempt at minute description, and who but would fail in the attempt to describe the wonderful view which suddenly appears—the shining blue rim of Table Bay, a harmony in blue and silver, Watts's 'Energy' in silhouette, the giant horse and rider dominating a huge precipice, the precipice which is the narrow, flat, and sandy isthmus of the Peninsula? ”

“ Our ponies met us at Muizenberg, and we crossed the railway-line on to the long white beach.
It was Easter Monday, and trainloads of inhabitants swarmed like gaudy bees round the bathing-huts. At no other time can one see to better advantage the wonderful fusion of races which has gone to the making of the population of the Cape Peninsula. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is something adorable in the green plaque over the front entrance—and instinctively it is chapeau bas—a small group of Dutchmen and Hottentots on the seashore—'The Landing of Van Riebeek.' The simplicity of the thing starts the weaving of the spell, which, in the plod, plod of life at the Cape, is a forgotten aspect. No nation can ever be great that has no time for sentimental patriotism. Why is it that this Africa cannot hold its people? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Everything is groaning under heavy military paint—teak doors, beautiful brass fittings and beamed ceilings—and about a mile away, shut up in a small ugly museum room, are the Rightful Inhabitants—the proper belongings of these long rooms: the oak tables, the big chairs, which once held the old Dutch Governors, the glass they used, the huge silver spittoons, their swords, the flowered panniers of their wives' dresses, fire-irons, brasses, china, the old flags, someone's sedan-chair—all bundled together in grotesque array. ”

“ 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 1663 there was a narrow road running close up to the mountain rather higher up than the present dusty main road. It ran as far as Rondebosch, or 'Rond die Bostje,' whose round-wood traditions are untraceable, Van Riebeek having given orders that only the outer bushes should be preserved as a convenient kraal for cattle. Along this narrow road a small ox-cart rumbled every day from the fort in Cape Town, dragging home logs of wood from the almost unknown land beyond; its driver running momentary risk of meeting in the narrow way the lions, tigers, or rhino, that roamed the mountain slopes. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Even the old Exchange is gone, with its stiff row of trees and its chained posts and kiosque, before which, in the turbulent days of Sir Harry Smith's régime, all Cape Town, English, Dutch, Malay, in stock, and crinoline, and turban, with one united voice roared against the Imperial Government's decree, which was to turn the Peninsula into a dumping-ground for convicts. Crinoline, stock, and turban kept the half-starved convict ships with their unwelcome freight for five months at anchor in Simon's Bay. ”

“ At Westerford is one of the old, fast-disappearing Outspan places—a big, bare spot under the oaks, with the white walls and thatch outhouses of the homestead which once belonged to Mostaert, 'living on the other side of the Schuur.' Here we saw, as we rode past, some wagons outspanned, the small black boys busy watering the mules and oxen in the river below, farmers lying about wreathed in tobacco smoke—the old days seem so quaintly characteristic, in spite of the near proximity of a wine-store and a forage-loft. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, 68 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. ”

“ The Hout Bay Valley has a distinctive charm of its own; its river-bed is overgrown with palmiet, and its thatched farmhouses have Huguenot names: for in this valley grants of land were made to the Huguenot refugees, the road is hedged with little pink Huguenot roses growing over the ground which pastured the Hottentots' cattle. The farm, Orange Grove, lies low in an oak wood. 99 We climbed the long Constantia Nek, and once more saw the widespread Isthmus, Constantia, Wynberg, and False Bay; little farms, little woods, the smoke from an engine—we had been round our world in a few hours. ”

“ With the adaptability which amounts to genius, which the women of newly-arisen cosmopolitan nations possess as Fate's compensation for depriving them of the birthright of history, tradition, and ancient habitation, they imitated the manners and fashions of the passing passengers resting a few days at the Cape on their way to India. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Van der Pool was noted for having in his cellars the best wine at the Cape—no one ever tasted it. He hated spinach, but spinach grew in the garden, and therefore must not be wasted. In the dark dining-room, with an old gazette serving for a tablecloth, sat old man Van der Pool waiting for his dinner. Up came the dinner, 'Saartje' with a big dish of spinach rotten with long keeping. Old man Van der Pool cursed Saartje and 59 spinach in best Dutch, and 'made a plan.' '"Saartje," say ole Bass, very gentle, soft like, "go fetch me from die cellar a best big bottle of ole Pontac." ”

“ 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 109 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. ”

“ In every family a slave was kept whose sole duty was the gathering of wood. It was strictly forbidden to gather any fuel, scrub, or bush on the Downs or Flats, so the slave would go out every morning up the mountains, and would return at night with two or three small bundles of faggots—the produce of six or eight hours' hard labour—swinging at the two ends of a bamboo carried across his shoulder. In some families more than one slave was kept for this purpose, and this gives a very good idea of the scarcity of wood at the 29 Cape as late as 1798. ”

“ A few years before Mynheer did without his after-dinner (luncheon) 'slaap' to entertain Lord Mornington and the Barnards, Monsieur Le Vaillant, turning his unappreciated French back on the town 'where only the English are loved,' wandered into the quince and myrtle-hedged vineyard of Cloete's Constantia, where his host, a Jacobin to his finger-tips, gave him a 'sopje' [6] of his best Constantia, and Le Vaillant bewailed his prejudiced Cape Town audience aloud:
'Mynheer, here in your Kaapstad, it is the 75 English who are adored; when they arrive, everyone is eager to offer them a lodging. ”