CAPE TOWN FROM TABLE BAY THE CAPE PENINSULA PEN AND COLOUR SKETCHES DESCRIBED BY RÉNÉ JUTA PAINTED BY W. WESTHOFEN LONDON: ADAM & CHARLES BLACK CAPE TOWN: J. C. JUTA & CO. 1910...

'Only those who see take off their shoes. The rest sit round and pluck blackberries and stain their faces with the natural hue of them.' 'I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here

Marinus and The Writer , two slightly sentimental travellers, in modern dress, generally riding-clothes. Immortals. And some others. Chorus. Hottentots, Bushmen, Saldanhas, Dutch Soldiers and Sailors, English Soldiers and Sailors, Burghers, Slaves, Market-Gardeners, Wine-Makers, Fishermen, and ordinary people from 1651 to 1910. THE CAPE PENINSULA...

Under three purple-flowered trees standing in the Castle courtyard, one blazing hot morning, we, more sentimentally than travellingly inclined, sat and rested while a khaki-clothed Tommy wandered round to find a guide to show us over the old Dutch fort. We thanked Heaven for his half-heartedness and for some shade. Marinus, fortunately for us both, smoked his pipe of peace and of Transvaal tobacco, and I opened the Brass Bottle, which, indeed, is no bottle at all, but, as everyone not vulgarly i

'For there is no country in the world where slaves are treated with so much humanity as at the Cape,' writes Le Vaillant in 1780, but in reading through the old day-books of Van Riebeek, Hackius, Borghorst, Isbrand Goski, and the Van der Stels, the punishments inflicted on slaves might have been inspired by those old, over-praised painters, who gloried in an anatomical dissection of a poor wretch whose miserable body possessed no anatomy at all. The Mozambique, Madagascar, and Malay slaves were

One day someone sat gazing at the big Devils Peak, which shadows Groote Schuur and stands like a rampart of the Citadel Mountain behind. As he gazed he became inspired; he said: 'There should be a monument to Rhodes, just there, on those steep green slopes under the Watch House, where the heavy Dutch cannon were dragged up to defend the bay.' The Rhodes trustees rose up and formed the chorus. So began the drama of the monument. The players were reinforced. Watts from London sent a huge bronze gr

From Newlands we rode, one glorious afternoon, up a small, conical hill at the back of Fernwood, or the old homestead 'Boshof.' There are several ways of arriving, but we, full of enthusiasm, chose to take a stony path hedged by scented wild-geraniums and ripening blackberry hedges, along which more than a hundred years ago a big wagon had rolled, dragging up the hill, as far as the ravines and rocks would allow, two occupants—Mr. Barnard, His Excellency's secretary, and Lady Anne, his wife. The

We traced one day the old boundary-line, the Liesbeek River, from its mouth near the Salt River to its sources in the woods of Paradise and Bishopscourt. In some of the old record-books I found this entry, which will do as a prologue to the chapter: ' Cabo de Bonne Esperance , ' September, 1652 . 'Riebeek and the Carpenter proceed' (it was proceeding with some great care and danger in those days) 'to the back of Table Mountain' (a vague term for everything which was not visible from the fort). '

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 silve

Lady Anne Barnard writes amusingly of a visit she paid to this green valley from her home on the other side of the hill, to the house of Mynheer Cloete, who once had to pay one thousand dollars for a large piece of Druip [5] stone. In a cave beyond Sir Lowry's Pass this gentleman saw the mass of petrifaction, and thinking it a safe thing, he made a bet with a Boer standing near that, though no one could possibly get such a fragile mass over the pass, he would give one thousand dollars to have it

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 th

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 le

Sea Point lies, white-roofed and aloe-hedged, under the sanctified Lion's Head Mountain; sanctified, because of a great white cross scarred into the bare rock by a nation to whom crosses and scars were almost inseparable. Da Gama's gigantic cross on the Lion's Head is one of the many to be found round the coast; but here begins and ends every trace of Portuguese possession or atmosphere in the Cape Peninsula. ON THE VICTORIA ROAD, NEAR OUDE KRAAL Old Sea Point savours of ancient Dutch régime, bu

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 plum

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. In the shade of one of the small, stationary wooden bathing-houses I saw the gardener's family, their colour scheme running through the gamut of shades from w