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Although the day was cool and the southerly wind had a biting quality about it, yet the whole aspect of the world about me was intensely sub-tropical. In heavy sunlight it would seem part of the countries north of the Tropic of Capricorn. The close-set trees, seen from above, appear like scrub, like close-set ti-tree. They are massed at the top, and among them lie white houses. Beyond them the lower slopes of the Devil’s Peak are yellow and red sand, but the grey-green waters of the bay, which is shaped like a great hyperbola, are edged with white sand.

Among the pines the rhythmic wind rose and fell; it whistled and wailed and died away. Beneath me came the faint sound of men calling; there was the clink of hammers upon stone.

But suddenly the town was lost among the trees, and when I sat down at last upon a seat I might have been among the woods above the Castle of Chillon, and, seen dimly among the foliage, the heights yonder could have been taken for the slopes of Arvel or Sonchaud. A bird whistled a short, repeated, melancholy song, and suddenly I remembered I had seen no sparrows here. A blackcap stared at me and fled; its triple note was repeated from bush to bush.

The wind rose again as I sat, but did not chill me in my sheltered hollow. It rose and fell in wavelike rhythm like the far thunder of waves upon a rock-bound coast. Then came silence, and again the wind was like the sound of a distant waterfall. There for one moment I caught the resinous smell of pine. It drew me back to the Rocky Mountains, and then to the woods above Zermatt, where I had last smelt that healthiest and most pleasing of woodland odours. I rose again and walked on.

Presently I gained a loftier height, and saw the Lion’s Head above me, a bold shield knob of rock rising out of silver trees, whose foliage is a pale glaucous green, resembling that of young eucalypti. Then, turning, I saw Capetown spread out beneath me, almost as one sees greater Naples from the Belvedere of the San Martino monastery. The whitish-grey town is furrowed into canyon-like streets. Beyond the town and over the flats was a view like that from Camaldoli. The foreground was scrub and pine and deep red earth, whereon men were building a new house. May fate send me here again when the sun is hot and the under world is all aglow!

I came at last to the little wind-swept divide between Table Mountain and the Lion’s Head. Here Capetown was lost to me, and I stood among sandy wastes where thin pines and whin-like bushes grow. And further still was the cold grey sea with the waves breaking on a rocky point and a little island all awash with white water.

Though beyond this divide the air was cold as death, the slopes of Table Mountain sweeping to the sea were full of colour; deep, strong, stern colour. When the sun shines and full summer rules upon the Cape Peninsula the place must be glorious. Even when I saw it an artist would wonder how it was that with such a chill wind the colour remained. And above the coloured lower slopes this new view of Table Mountain suggested a serried rank of sphinxes staring out across the desert sea. The nearest peak of the mountain is weathered, cracked and scarred, and it in are two chimneys that appear accessible only for the oreads who block the way with their smoky clouds. In the far north-eastern distance the grey headlands melted into the grey ocean. But beneath me were the tender green of the birch-like silver tree and the rich young leaves of the transplanted English oak.