CHAPTER VI

THE BOSHEUVEL, OR HEN AND CHICKENS HILL

We crossed the river at the bottom of the Bishopscourt gardens, and found ourselves looking down the long fir avenue, arched as perfectly as the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Opposite, ran another little avenue along the side of the hill, and to the right, staring at us like black and white toadstools of monstrous size out of the green gloom, the thatched cottages of Bishopscourt.

We chose a little narrow pathway running up the hill from the middle avenue, winding through low protea-bush and silver-trees.

There is cruel, continuous, silent fighting on this hillside--the battle between the silver-trees and the firs. The firs, or pines, who came here last, are creeping, year by year, higher and higher up the hill; year by year the brave little 'witteboomen' (white trees) are driven before this strong green army of invaders; soon there will be a last stand on the hilltop--the survival of the fittest. We shall all see it; we are seeing it every day of our lives--and will no one help? The pines are helped by unthinking man in his horrible materialism--the silver-tree branches are easy to break off, and make good fuel. Day by day, like a file of gaudy beetles, the dwellers of 'Protea' crawl along our little path and down again to the river huts, with loaded shoulders, and leave the silver woods leaner.

A hundred years ago Anne Barnard, herself a tree-planter for the generations to come, talks with satisfaction of 'The Marriage of Miss Silver-tree and Donald Fir-tops.' Marinus says I am a sentimental traveller, but it is a distressing end to such a _ménage_ after only one hundred years! Barrow, the naturalist, speaks of the moth which feeds on the _Protea argenta_, and suggests turning them to some account, seeing that it is said to be exactly the same insect which spins the strong Indian silk called 'Tussach.' Here is an idea of interest, but that means the protection of the silver-tree. There is in Cape Town a society for the preservation of objects of national interest--a slumbering giant of the moment. The protection of natural objects of national importance and beauty should appear as an amendment on its syllabus. In France, a fat little bourgeois Ministre de l'Instruction Publique et des Beaux Arts, or the fatter and more bourgeois Sous-Préfet of a small town, will run about on any hot day or any cold day, with all the importance and authority of the State embodied in his active patriotic French body and his 'red ribbon,' and behold! 'Messieurs, you would destroy this tree--"tiens!"--destroy the beauty of France, "je vous demande?" Never, "jamais de la vie!"' The tree stays. That ancient wall destroying the value of a good building site--'tant pis!' It remains! 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité'--the New Rule; but we must perforce worship the Old. Such the snobbism of La Patrie, La France.

Such is my plea for the shining, Ancient Inhabitants of the Bosheuvel. Most travellers assert that they are unique, growing in no other part of the world; and many affirm that they are indigenous. Their evolution is distinctly traceable in the soft grey silkiness on the back of the leaves of the large, yellow protea-bush. A careful walk across the Wynberg hills, and you will come back to report that nearly every shrub or even quite tiny ground plant is of the protea family, vastly productive and attractive family, from the yellow giants with their pink-tipped cousins, the sugar-bushes--the treasure caves of the bees and tiny, brilliant, green sugar-birds--to the top-heavy white protea, sometimes painted, like Alice's red rose-tree, a deep crimson. Some very distant cousins, who have not risen sufficiently high in their world, have no flowers at all, only brilliant-coloured red and yellow stem tops.

We have seen the Bosheuvel in many moods and seasons; we have been there when the sweet-smelling pink flower, half acacia, half pea, the Keurboom, lines the paths, and Bishopscourt lies in a deep blue sea of mist, while above, the 'Skeleton' and 'Window' Gorges are mauve with aching buds of the oaks in early spring. Now it is middle summer, with fields of yellow mustard flower, tall blue reeds, and wild-geraniums, of which it is said that 'this tribe of plant alone might imitate in their leaves every genus of the vegetable world.'

Our ponies crackled their way over the dead silver leaves as we climbed over this old outpost hill, from whose summit the agitated freemen or soldiers would see the 'Caapmen' dancing round their fires below. The hill has a fighting reputation; terrible murders of slaves and burghers and cattle-thieving were daily recorded from the vicinity of the Bosheuvel in the first Commander's journal. Van Riebeek, walking up from his farm below, saw 'Kyekuyt,' his second outpost, burning away to the tune of this Hottentot singing; saw the Saldanhas pressing close to its base, forming one long ominous barrier along the blue shadow. His mind was full of tricks for peace. By a clever ruse he turned these savages with their herds through the Kloof Nek, hoping they might wander away to Cape Point. But they hurried back over the Constantia or Wynberg Pass, and their cattle fed with the Company's cattle, and they danced once again on the 'Hen and Chickens,' whose grey granite boulders, several small rocks clustering round a big one, would form fit temples for these worshippers of the moon.

When we reached the famous 'Grey Hen' overlooking the Wynberg Park, Marinus produced a small piece of paper, and read from it this scheme of peace, signed in full by the Council and the Commander, recommending their decision to the grace of God and the approval of Amsterdam: 'That not only should the Colony be protected from the ravages of the Hottentots by the redoubts placed at intervals along the river, with the last and farthest on the Bosheuvel, called "Hout den Bul" (Hold the Bull), but a fence of bitter almonds should be planted across the Bosheuvel, stretching to the bottom and then going off at a direct angle along the river lands to the seashore.'

On our way along the river we have behaved with more inquisitiveness than respect; most unsuspecting people have had their gardens and fields incautiously explored by Marinus and me. Here and there we have found in the overgrown garden of a thatched house, in a tangle of oleanders (or Chinese roses, as the Dutch call them)--and goodness knows they are the only flowers that can possibly account for the floral decorations on old China--myrtle hedges, Cape jasmine, and magnolias (can't you smell the garden?), a few little clumps of the shining, green bitter almond, the last of the old fence.

It is not, however, hard to find on the Bosheuvel Hill, though it is always being destroyed in the bush fires so frequent on the hill, when in a few minutes hundreds of trees have given one sharp crackle of agony, and are charred heaps of silvery ashes. We traced it, this old warrior of a hedge which was once the only shade for the horsemen and soldiers stationed at the Redoubt. It crosses the middle of the hill. It once looked on one side on the farm of the Commander, and on the other side on the huts and kraals of the Hottentots, whose erring cattle poked their uncivilized horns through its thick greenness; and now its aged branches lap over a barbed-wire fence which runs along the farms Oosterzee and Glen Dirk, of Mr. Philip Cloete and his brother; while, on the other side, the firs and oaks hide the white walls of Bishopscourt. The silver-tree and the bitter-almond hedge are the Ancient Inhabitants, and Marinus and I felt we were friends and in league with the barbed-wire fence, and we hated the position.

So we rode down the hill into the Wynberg Park, and leaving the camp on the left we crossed the glen at the bottom of Glen Dirk, and, behold, we were in a sea of vineyards, the purple bunches almost resting their ripe weight on the burning pink earth.

Some old naturalist thinks that it is to the laziness of the old vine-growers that we owe the slow evolution of our wine. No tall trellised vines or standards of France and Spain and the Rhine, no rows of mulberry-trees supporting the hanging tendrils as in Italy, but low, stubby-looking little vine-sticks; and, says my authority of a hundred years ago, 'as is well known, the exhalations from the earth are so much imbibed by the leaves of the tobacco plant which grow nearest to it, that those leaves are always rejected as unfit for use, so it is natural to suppose that the fruit of the vine hanging very near to, or even resting upon, the ground, will also receive the prevailing flavour exhaling from the soil.' This was the theory of a theorist. I have the authority of a wine-maker who says that it is not only the heavy spring winds that have necessitated low vines, but that the Cape wine was, and is, essentially a sweet wine, and to procure the right amount of sugar it is important to grow the vines as near the ground as possible, that the radiation of the sun off the ground may ripen them. Later came the demand for a lighter wine, and creeping vines were introduced grown on wire, but as close to the ground as possible, otherwise the wine does not maintain itself, and becomes acid. The old Pontac vine, which is a creeper by nature, was treated in the old days, and is still treated as a creeper, by tying a long cane across the centre of the tree, so that it lies horizontally across, close to the ground; no wire is used, or the days of sweet Pontac would be over.

My first authority, the theorist, deplores, in excellent English, the slackness that existed in the making of wine and brandy. I remember with horror seeing in Constantia cellars the old process in full swing. Huge vats--the hugeness of a fairy-tale ogre's bath--raised high up in the gloom of the cellar, the sickening smell of fermentation, the squash, squash, bubble, bubble, of the juice oozing through the vat holes, and the sweating blacks, in tunics that reached to the knee and were once white, treading and squashing the grapes, their black faces bobbing up and down in the great vats, sometimes singing, or spitting out the chewed tobacco, the Nirvana of the workers. My whole body and soul revolted against this physical strength and stench--to me it was the greatest weapon in the total abstainer crusade; the nauseous odour of malt and beer is nothing to it.

Oh! it's a fascinating subject, this culture of the Vine, as old as the hills, and with the greatest sympathy do the Jew and the Gentile view it; and its cosmopolicy is almost perfect. It makes brothers of strangers, swine of brothers; it is an everlasting monument to Adam--he went out of Paradise to till the ground, and wherefore till unless to grow the vine which alone can make him forget Paradise--and in its long pageant come passing by, old Noah and his sons, who peopled the earth; Dionysius and his followers--his troupe of Bacchantes revelling in leopard skins, purple grapes and flowing hair, and in turn their ghastly following of fauns and satyrs, the chorus for their appalling rites and festivals; then comes the solemn Persian, whose women carried the purple wine while he sang the praises of both, in the guise of the philosophy of the most ancient Abyssinian Universities; in great disorder crowd along the poisoners of early Rome and the Renaissance, carrying their fatal goblets; the decadent revellers of Lemnos in artistic drunkenness--roses and pearls and wine and the heated dancers of inspiration, which made luxury to be desired. In the crowd, jostling with all, pass Popes and Cardinals with more wine--strange vicissitude! The Host of the Lord followed by the faithful--it is now become the religion of the world. Then come the painters, the great 'primitives,' and the makers of the new religion, creators of sublime pictures--a 'Last Supper'; the wine in the cup, pure red, as red as the wine Bacchus is flinging over his drunken followers, as red as the wine of Omar, of Cleopatra's love-philtres dissolving pearls. Great Fellowship of the Vine; it rules the world! Continue looking: there is more procession; picturesque, besatined men who have fought picturesque duels, and gambled and drunk wine in the coffee-houses (what a paradox!), men who have made poems and books, and run States and Empires, and have laid with unflagging regularity under their tables in the respectability which rank and custom made possible; and looming in the gloom behind the pageant are the shadows of the invading army. They, too, have kept their pattern in this kaleidoscope; the men who have made a Hell for the drunkards--the Ironsides, Calvinists, Protestants, a dull crowd to follow such gorgeousness. The Banners of Temperance are Grey and Green: and grey is an enduring colour, and clashes with nothing; and green is the colour of the World! the Earth! and the woods! leaves and pure water! the singing of birds! time to sleep, time to eat, time to listen! This may be behind the grey banners; but the Eyes of the Pageant are near-sighted and tired with overmuch colour and vibration, and the Ears of the Pageant are tuned too high to hear the song of birds.

We have been round the Mulberry Bush, round and round....

'This is the way we have brushed our hair; This is the way we have washed our faces; This is the way we have eaten our food; This is the way we go to bed; This is the way we get up again.'

All the cynical philosophy of that child-game brings us back to where we started--the vineyards.

I told all this to Marinus as we lazed along the path through the vineyards, with Klastenbosch Woods on our right and tiny thatched farms with a symmetrical patch of cabbages and violets supporting each household: the slopes of the Tokai or Steenbergen ranges before us, 'Un paysage après Claud.'

Constantia was once divided into two big plots--Great and Little--and a few things in between which didn't count much.

Now--well, there are such pretty names; old Klastenbosch, its outhouses dying in their old faith, with dilapidated Dutch white and green and low stoeps, while the dwelling-house flaunts its regenerated walls in newly-acquired glory, full of comfortable English furniture--the fullest example of the new South African nation, in ideals laid down by a clever man--_enfin!_ what could be more solid than such combination? English, Dutch, and German. But the Klastenbosch pigs are still black, and they grunt and nozzle in the oak forest and along the stream with the wild olive-trees on its banks _comme autrefois_. To continue the list of names. Just below us in a poplar forest lies 'Belle Ombre'; to our left is 'Alphen'; and we trotted past its gates and low white walls, along the avenue of twisted, red-dusted stone-pines, past 'Hauptville,' a tiny spot in the midst of its acres of vines, and up the pink, pine-edged Constantia road to Groot Constantia.