The Cape Peninsula: Pen and Colour SketchesHansard, Réné
History
The Cape Peninsula: Pen and Colour Sketches
Hansard, Réné
Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) -- Description and travel; Eastern Cape (South Africa) -- Description and travel
In a large sloping field to the right of the path live, in happy
monotony, four or five llamas, while in another teak-gated enclosure
the striped zebras are gazing in mild surprise at a fierce wildebeeste
stalking along the other side of the thin wire fence.
Far across the purple sandy flats with their blue barriers to the
north--the 'Mountains of Africa'--lie the big vleis, or lakes, and
near them the tall white spire of the tiny Lutheran church, little
shepherd of all the German souls who cluster round in white farms,
growing lettuce on week-days and singing Lutheran hymns on Sunday.
At the top of the gravel road, almost buried in a kloof of stunted
oaks and yellow protea-bush, is a cottage, where the two sons of that
fat King of the Matabele, Lobengula, lived and were educated. What has
happened to them since Rhodes's death I do not know; they may be
studying French and science at the Sorbonne, or, having married
somebody's 'respectable English housemaid,' may be the happy fathers
of a tinted family of pupil teachers or typewriters!
We climbed higher, and were soon in the shadow of the Devil's Peak or
Doves Peak.
The name 'Devil' must have drifted from the 'Cape' to the Wind
Mountain. 'Windberg' was the ordinary name for the Peak, and 'Devil's
Cape' was the name given to the Cape many years before Diaz's ship was
driven round into the Indian Ocean.
Humboldt, the German traveller, has interesting information about this
name. He says that on Fra Mauro's world chart, published between 1457
and 1459, the Cape of Good Hope is marked 'Capo Di Diab!'
Diaz, to his surprise and unintention, rounded the Cape in 1486.
But even before this, others than the 'Flying Dutchman' sailed these
seas. On the old planisphere of 'Semito,' made in 1306, the tricorned
shape of South Africa is shown, and in a note added later to the
planisphere it is stated that an Indian junk coming from the East
circumnavigated this Cape 'Diab.'
To those who have thought of this Cape as shrouded in mystery until
the Portuguese sailors rounded it, the shock might be similar to the
state of mind of the Ignoble Vulgar (used in the sense of ignorance),
who find, one day, that quite a decent system of education existed
before the Flood; but shattering a fallacious perspective may not
necessarily widen a horizon, and Sheba's Mines of Ophir, the voyages
of the Phoenicians, Moorish slavers, Indian junks, gold, and apes,
and peacocks, and Flying Dutchmen, may still be in the jig-saw pattern
border of South Africa.
Groups of almond-trees guide us to two cement and iron cages. There,
lying blinking benignly in the sun, are the famous lions of Groote
Schuur--almost monuments in themselves.
Did not their ancestors roam over these very slopes of the mountain,
and swoop down into the cornfields and ricefields of the Company's
burghers, seeking water and shelter from the raging north winds, in
the comfortable piece of land 'Rond die Bosch' below?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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