We left our ponies with the black man and pushed our way in silence through the overgrown garden, all the terraces still banked up by small stone walls, now moss-covered, past little garden paths running along the mountain-stream, and fig-trees long since overgrown and forgetful of bearing fruit; and higher up towards the mountain we found two graves and four or five chestnut-trees--'the finest chestnuts I ever saw by many, many degrees,' says Anne. But wherever we went the thin, twisted, fantastic oaks, like deformed gnomes reared in the dark, barred the way of 'Paradise' to intruders, and with the rustling breeze the frightened squirrels and the ghosts of this Trianon rushed away before us into the gloom. Once, when sitting alone, only breathing a little Greek poem of praise to Pan, I thought I saw a ghost of this dead 'Paradise,' forming etheresque, vague and elusive, between the green hanging strands of creepers.... It was only the web of a wood-spider caught in a shaft of sunlight which had shot through the heavy roof of leaves. The garden which should have grown the most sensitive plants now grows weeds; only in a deserted corner we found a quaint, aromatic pink flower with a scent which suggested the East. The light was fading; Anne in her letters remarks upon this: 'The sun sets here in "Paradise" two hours sooner than on the other side of the hill, which I am told marks its height, but with lamps and candles it makes no difference. We have nothing here to annoy us--except mosquitoes and the baboons who come down in packs to pillage our garden of the fruit with which the trees are laden.' 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. CHAPTER V THE LIESBEEK RIVER 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_.