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 white to chocolate. The gardener had once had a Cockney wife, and his life was ''ell,' so he married Marlie, the slightly coloured girl brought up on a German mission-station, who made excellent stews, washed his shirts well, and sang Lutheran hymns to the children when they howled. There were ancestors, black and white, on both sides--and everyone hasn't ancestors. [Illustration: TABLE MOUNTAIN FROM RETREAT FLATS] We passed a wagon-load of Malays in gala dress of silks and spangles--our washerwomen--possessing the wondrous Oriental gift of elusive speech, which will turn away good Christian wrath. One old Malay told us he remembered the days when all the Malays made their pilgrimage yearly to the grave of Sheik Joseph. A political prisoner of the East India Company, of great wealth and position in the East, he was exiled to the Cape, and lived at the mouth of the Eerste River, near the farm of the Governor's witty brother, Franz Van der Stel. There is a sepulchre which is called the 'Kramat,' or resting-place of a holy man. The wanderers of the Flats in those early days would often come upon the Sheik and his forty followers galloping across the sand-hills. This generation of followers wore suits of neat blue serge, and, over the fez, a wide reed hat with a low, pointed crown. Marinus and I thought it would require a Shakespeare to describe the heterogeneous mass we passed through. Pathetic sometimes--a knock-kneed clerk from Cape Town, shivering in a new, dark-blue bathing suit, vainly trying to acclimatize his pasty-faced offspring to the waves. Complexions are hard to keep in South Africa; the sun is our master, all-absorbing and requiring all--colour, brain, energy--your puny effort of concentration useless against this fierce, concentrated mass, this alluring South African sun--Lorelei of the South. The very people here are an example--not one concentrated type. Marinus and I soliloquized quietly until we reached the shallow river which feeds the Lakeside Vleis (lakes). We avoided the beach and kept close up to the sand-dunes, the white sand protected from the tearing gales of the 'south-easters' by a network of creeping 'Hottentot fig,' a fleshy plant with wonderful bright flowers of every hue, and bearing an acquired taste in fruit--a small, dried-up-looking fig. Tall flowering reeds grow in 'klompjes,'[7] and dotted about are small green bushes covered with red berries--'dinna bessies,' the coloured folk call them. 'Not much cover for the hippo,' laughed Marinus.