pouring over
from the plateau 4000 feet above the town.

On the left of the true Table Mountain there is a rugged and ragged
dip, and further still the rocks rise again in the sharper pinnacles of
the Devil's Peak. That slopes away till it runs down into the
house-dotted Cape flats, and beyond it lie Rondebosch, Wynberg and
Constantia. Across the grey and misty flats other mountains
rise--mountains of a strange shape which suggests a peculiar and unusual
geological formation.

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
fro