In a balloon issuing from the mouth of the gentle shepherd was this motto, carrying a deeper philosophy: 'Life's but a journey; let us live well on the road, says the gentle shepherd of Salisbury Plain.' On the opposite side of the road are the ruins of the barracks, a low, stone, thatched house in a green field, surrounded by a stone wall. Anne Barnard drove down at the peril of her life, she thought, to Simonstown, or False Bay as it was called, and, passing Muizenberg on her way, found the garrison living in huts, and was regaled on boiled beef and Constantia wine served by the late steward of the Duke of Orleans. 'Un mauvais sujet,' says Lady Anne. The main road runs at the foot of the mountains, with a railway-line and a few yards of beach and rock between it and the sea. The most wonderful sea in the world! emerald green, with mauve reefs of rock showing through its clearness; sapphire blue towards Simonstown, the colour of forget-me-nots sweeping the white crescent of Muizenberg sands. We passed St. James and Kalk Bay, where the steam-trawler was coming in like a big brown hen to roost surrounded by all the fishing-boats, some still on the horizon, like straggling chickens, flying along with their white wings sparkling and fluttering in the sun and south-east breeze. [Illustration: ON FISHHOEK BEACH, NORDHOEK MOUNTAINS IN DISTANCE] At Fish Hoek, the dangerous beach of quicksands, the setting sun poured through the Kommetje and Noord Hoek Valley, tinting the sandhills until they glowed like gigantic opals; the lights swept pink over the blue streams running across the beach into the sea, and the long line of wave, which rolled in to meet them, made a bank of transparent aquamarine before it curled itself on to the shore--thin blueness with foam-scalloped edges. We rounded another mountain corner and came upon Glen Cairn with its beach-streams and quarries. Clusters of stone huts, like prehistoric dwellings on the mountain slopes, are the homes of the quarrymen. Simonstown had begun to consider its nightcap when we rode slowly round the last corner. The dark grey cruisers were hardly discernible in the dusk; across the bay, on the Hottentot's Holland, a fire crawled like a red snake up the mountains; the light on the Roman Rock Lighthouse was lit. The gardens of Admiralty House are terraced above the sea by a long, low white wall; to the right is an enormous white plaster figure of Penelope, the old figure-head from the ship of that name, and the unseeing eyes of the watchful Penelope are turned towards the decrepit hulk lying a few hundred yards away. Great magenta masses of bougainvillæa hid the low house, and soon the darkness hid all.