For ten miles along the foot of the mountains stretch the suburbs of Cape Town, villa and garden, and pine and oak avenue mingling themselves in endless succession. Here it seems a man might dream away his life, buried in roses and plumbago, and forget that pain and care existed.
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.