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 left the Platt Klip Gorge, like a great rent in the grey mountain. My guide, who is a philosopher, started a story--at least, I thought it was a fairy-tale--of a sanatorium on the flat top and a railway. 'Cape Town has got that up its sleeve'--I realized that he really was speaking sense. It will happen, of course, in the natural order of things; and it will bring the believers and the unbelievers--those who see and those 'who pick blackberries to stain their faces'--the cool gorges will echo with their voices, the Disa will be hedged round with regulations stronger than barbed wire, and the swampy ground which now grows shiny white pebbles will grow potatoes and lettuce for the multitude. In the old journal we have the first record of the climbing of Table Mountain: '_Sunday, September 29, 1652._ 'Fine day. Our assistants and two others ascended Table Mountain with the Ottento, who speaks a little English; saw the fires lit by them; ascent difficult; top of mountain flat--as broad and three times as long as the Dam of Amsterdam, with some pools of fresh water.' The present pool has very little water; but then, it is summer, and we took the rain gauge for the month and poured back on to the earth three large drops of water! Barrow, in his description of the ascent, which he made in the charming company of the Barnards, talks of the view from the top: 'All the objects on the plain below are, in fact, dwindled away to the eye of the spectator into littleness and insignificance. The flat-roofed houses of Cape Town, disposed into formal clumps, appear like those paper fabrics which children are accustomed to make with cards. The shrubbery on the sandy isthmus looks like dots, and the farms and their enclosures as so many lines, and the more-finished parts of a plan drawn on paper.' But we crossed the flat top and came to the Wynberg side: saw the country, neatly mapped as Barrow says, bathed in sunshine. My guide has been a sailor, and has travelled round the world, but here he says: 'Here is the best view in the world!' and he went off to examine more rain gauges. It is a wonderful thing to be utterly alone with the earth and the sun; to become a hill Pantheist, but to realize why, in a hot stone church, one can get up and sing that the Sun, the Moon, the Air, the Mountains, and the Earth may bless and praise the Lord. CHAPTER IX ROUND THE LION'S HEAD AND THE VICTORIA ROAD