Perhaps one of the finest views in the world is that from the top of
the Kloof behind Cape Town. To your right is Table Mountain, one of the
sublimest masses of solid matter in the world; below are the pine woods
and the town, with its white, flat houses, and, beyond the blue curved
bay and Blue-Berg Strand, the mountains of Hottentot's Holland, with
a canopy of clouds appearing and receding again into the blue sky. As
you turn, behind you is the blue South Atlantic as far as the eye can
reach, and the terrible serrated peaks of the Twelve Apostles stand
facing it, peak beyond peak, as they have stood for endless ages, with
the sea breaking in the little bays at their feet.
The population of the Western Province is partly English and partly
Boer or Dutch-Huguenot, the descendants of the Dutch East Indian
Company's servants and settlers, and of a large number of French
Huguenots who arrived in the Colony about 1687, driven from France
by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who, winnowed by the
unerring flail of religious persecution, form, perhaps, the finest
element that has ever been added to the population of South Africa. The
labouring classes are, as elsewhere in South Africa, coloured, and here
largely half-castes, the descendants of the first Dutch residents and
their slaves, or much more rarely of blended Dutch and Hottentot blood.
In Cape Town itself are found also Malays, Chinamen, Hindus, and the
representatives of all European nations.
If leaving Cape Town we go a few hundred miles eastward, along the
coast, we shall find the lowland belt assume new characteristics. The
hills, though high, are softer and more rounded, covered completely
with soil and grass; or their sides, and even summits, are clothed in
bush, stretching for ten or twenty or forty miles. This bush is neither
forest nor scrub. In the valleys of high mountains, or along the
beds of watercourses, it becomes true forest, of vast, thick-stemmed,
timber-producing trees; monkey-ropes thicker than a man's arm hang down
from the branches, and there is forest shade. But, in the main, South
Africa bush is composed of creeper-like bushes, sometimes attaining
forty feet in height, and of many hollow-skinned succulent plants,
aloe, elephant's food, euphorbia, which often attain the height of tall
trees, but are of so light a structure that cut down a child may drag
them. Sometimes the bush grows more or less continuously, the clumps
and bushes being merely intersected everywhere by what seem like little
dry paths.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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