Groot Constantia again

A bright but unflattering sidelight is shed by Captain Robert Percival upon the production, sale, and distribution of the fabled vin de Constance in the neighborhood of Groot Constantia. Captain Percival’s An Account of the Cape of Good Hope (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1804) was reviewed by “Muir”—paraphrased really—in the Monthly Review in February the following year (pp. 130–143). According to Muir,

“The inferiority of most Cape wines to those of Europe proceeds from no inherent defect in the grapes, but from the slovenly practices of keeping them too near the surface of the ground, mixing both leaves and foot-stalks in the wine-press to increase the quantity of juice, pulling the fruit in an unripe state, checking the fermentation, and employing sulphur and sugar of lead for the purpose of fining. The remarks, however, apply not to the celebrated Constantia wine, concerning which our author has favoured us with some interesting information. The beautiful little village of Constantia and its vine plantations, with the Table Mountain, are considered as the principal objects of curiosity at the Cape:

‘Round the vineyards, dwelling houses, and offices, are pleasant groves of silver-tree, besides oak, elms, and other smaller plants, which completely shelter it in every direction, and hide it from the view till you wind round the hill, and come quite close to it. There are two distinct and separate plantations of vines here, each of a different colour and quality, though both are called Constantia wines. The first farm, called Great Constantia, produces the red wine of that name; and at Lesser Constantia, in its vicinity, the white is made. The farm, which alone produces this richly flavoured wine, belongs to a Dutchman, Mynheer Pluter [sic, his name was Hendrik Cloete] and has been long in his family [sic, the property changed hands twice in 1778, when Mr. Cloete’s father bought it, barely twenty-five years earlier]…

‘The quantity of wine made on the farms of Constantia, on an average, is about seventy-five leagers a year, each leager containing upwards of one hundred and fifty gallons of our measure. It is a sweet, heavy, and luscious wine, not fit to be drunk in any quantity, but chiefly suited to a dessert, as a couple of glasses are quite as much as one would desire to drink at a time. It is even here excessively dear and difficult to be procured, and must be often bespoke a considerable time. The captains of vessels touching here, who have wished to procure a quantity of it, have been frequently obliged to contract for it a year or two before the wine was made.

‘Under the Dutch government [to 1795] the farmer divided the produce into three parts; one-third he was obliged to furnish, at a certain price, to the Dutch East-India Company, who sent it to the government in Holland. Another proportion was furnished to certain of the inhabitants of Cape Town, chiefly the people in high office and power, at the same rate; and the remaining quantity he was at liberty to dispose of at what price he could to the passengers, and captains of ships of all nations. The price to strangers varied according to circumstances; when there was any deficiency in the produce of his farm, the price was always raised in proportion. The Dutch inhabitants in Cape Town, at whose houses and tables the passengers are accommodated, rarely ever produce a drop of this wine, except upon very extraordinary occasions. The Dutch indeed are sufficiently careful never to open a bottle of this valuable liquor at their tables, unless they perceive it may serve their own purposes. A rich Englishman who has made his fortune in India, and from whom they expect a handsome present of tea, sugar candy, or muslin, is honoured now and then with a bottle of Constantia at the dessert; but a British officer who is not supposed to be flush of money or valuable articles, except where he is a favourite with the lady of the house [!], may go without it all the time he remains here.

‘When a bottle of Constantia is to be bought at the Cape Town, which is but seldom the case, and even then it requires some management to procure it, it is never sold under a couple of dollars. But it generally happens that strangers, although they procure this prize, are still as far as ever from tasting real Constantia, as there is another kind of sweet, rich wine, which the Dutch frequently pass off for it.

‘One may fortunately, by dint of persuasion, get at the village of Constantia, from Mynheer Pluter [Cloete], a small cask containing about twenty gallons for ten or twelve pounds sterling; a stranger can seldom procure a larger quantity at the same time; indeed he must always be particularly recommended to take any quantity he can obtain, and also to prevent having the other heavy, sweet wine imposed upon him for Constantia. Mr. Pluter has a great number of visitors to his farm, who are equally attracted by the beauty of the place, and the desire of seeing the vine plantations, with the manner of making the wine. He is in every respect a complete Dutchman. For though used to such a variety of the first company, and gentlemen of high civil, and military situations, who always pay liberally, and whom it is strongly his interest to encourage to his farm by civility, and a suavity of manners, he is generally morose, uncouth, and churlish in his manners; and it is rare to see him in a good humor, though he gains a great profit by entertaining his occasional guests with his nectar. Money is the idol of the Dutch; yet they receive it without thanking those who bring it, or encouraging them to come again by civility and attention; and when they have once received their extravagant demand, they laugh at the folly of our countrymen for their indifference in parting with that money which is their own idol.

‘I was so unfortunate as not to find this gentleman in a good humor during the two or three visits I made to his farm, and could scarcely get a bottle of wine, or leave to look at his wine vaults and presses, not having brought any particular recommendation from his friends at the Cape, which from pride he regularly exacts. I relied however on what I knew of a Dutchman’s partiality for English customers; but on my requesting leave to see the place, he himself came out and informed me the gentleman was not at home. The other officers who were along with me, however, and who understood his disposition better, and the requisite management, got some of the slaves for a present to get us wine, and shew us the plantations and manner of manufacturing the grapes into wine; nor did we take the smallest notice of the owner’s surliness and boorish manners when we afterwards met him, but went on to satisfy our curiosity, and obtain the wine and information we wanted. If company arrives before he is dressed, and has got over his usual quantity of pipes and tobacco, he denies himself, and does not wish to admit them unless he is pretty sure of getting hard dollars; those perfectly acquainted with this, take care to let the slaves see the cash, on which he sends any quantity into an arbor in the garden, and when the bill is called, he charges two Spanish dollars a bottle, equal to 11s. 6d. British. Some allowances must certainly be made for Mynheer Pluter’s [Cloete’s] moroseness, as it is impossible for him at all times to attend to the reception of his visitors; some of whom by their teizing and forward loquacity, might render themselves extremely troublesome and disagreeable to his grave and solemn habits. His slaves are exceedingly attentive and communicative, when allowed to wait on and conduct strangers, finding it highly to their advantage, as they always get something for themselves.

‘Mr. Pluter’s wine vaults are very extensive and neatly laid out, and every thing is in much better order than at any other wine farm I have seen. In the vaults and wine cellars of the merchants at Cape Town, the wine is kept in very large butts or vessels somewhat shaped like a hogshead, but the rotundity is vastly greater in proportion. Those vessels are made of mahogany, or a wood very much resembling it, very thick, highly polished, and kept clean as our dining tables; they are bound round with great brass hoops, and the edges are secured by the same metal, so that no accident or time can damage them. Each of those butts or reservoirs, which they call leagers, though an inapplicable term, as a leager is a measure of one hundred and fifty gallons, will contain from six to seven hundred gallons. The bung-holes are covered with plates of brass hasped down and locked; the cocks are also strong and large, with locks and keys to them, so that the slaves are prevented from embezzling any of the wine, as they are never opened but in presence of one of the proprietors. Some of these leagers are elegantly carved and ornamented with various figures.’”

Captain Percival’s low opinion of Mr. Cloete, and Mr. Cloete’s presumably of each and every officer of the Royal Navy who wished to buy a few bottles of fine Constantia, and to bribe his slaves, were no doubt thrown into high relief by the outcome of the Battle of Muizenberg of 1795, the subsequent demise of the Dutch administration of the Cape, and its replacement by the British—with a brief hiatus between 1803 and 1806, when, under the Treaty of Amiens, the British handed it back to the Batavian Republic. More generally the Dutch colonists could hardly have been expected to entertain uninvited representatives of the new regime with reckless extravagance, or to forfeit a ready supply of their precious Constantia at the obviously unprofitable navy discount. On the other hand, there can be no excuse for serving, and far less selling, counterfeit Constantia—klein or groot.

Bo-Kaap

Bo-Kaap is the largely Muslim district of inner Cape Town, built against the slopes of Signal Hill, which is still today largely populated by the descendants of former slaves of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. It is often called the “Malay” quarter, but this is really a misnomer because the local community is far more ethnically diverse than that—and in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Dutch brought slaves from all over the Indian Ocean rim, and far beyond. It is a fascinating neighborhood.

There are still numerous small mosques, each with a particular ethnic or sectarian or local, even family or community affiliation: the shafee or “Indonesian” Auwal Mosque (1798); the Palm Tree or Jan Van Boughies Mosque in Long Street (1820); the Nurul Islam Mosque at 134 Buitengracht Street (1844); the Jamia or Queen Victoria Mosque in Lower Chiappini Street (1850); The Mosque of Imam Hadjie or Mosque Shafee in Upper Chiappini Street (1859); the Hanafee Mosque on the corner of Dorp and Long Streets (1881); the Boorhaanol Mosque in Longmarket Street (1884); the Quawatul Islam Mosque in Loop Street (1892); the Nurul Mohamadia Mosque in Vos Street (1899), and the Nurul Huda Mosque in Leeuwen Street (1958), among others.

It is often extremely difficult for the non-Muslim visitor fully to grasp the subtle differences between these various mosques, but the concept of the parish as distinct from the denomination certainly seems to help. Most are very small. The little row houses in surrounding streets are almost invariably painted bright, sometimes dazzling colours, wholly delightful. I was warned to be very careful walking around Cape Town, but I never once felt remotely threatened or uneasy in Bo-Kaap. The atmosphere was friendly, relaxed, even at times genuinely sleepy.

It is slightly unclear to me why Bo-Kaap escaped the shocking fate of District 6, but I suspect that even in the dark 1960s, the area was regarded as perhaps too difficult and expensive to demolish and reorganize, or even just possibly worthy of preservation as a kind of picturesque, certainly unthreatening remnant. In a way it is tempting to use Bo-Kaap as an imaginary framework with which to imagine what the messier, rowdier, more commercial, less candy-coloured streetscape of District 6 must have been like in its heyday.

Lately a different fear has arisen, namely that processes of gentrification will eventually drive out the locals who have lived here in many cases since the mid-eighteenth century, in other words achieving by ordinary market forces (and neglect) what Apartheid entrusted to the Group Areas Act. What is especially intriguing is the persistence through the otherwise plain built environment of flourishes, arabesques, curly-cues, and hints toward gabling that you associate primarily with Cape Dutch and therefore VOC “style,” a sort of aesthetic Stockholm Syndrome, but maybe also a plucky sign of conquest also. It is impossible not to like Bo-Kaap.

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The Cape of Good Hope again

Australians are everywhere, even at the lighthouse high above the Cape of Good Hope. Among the forest of signposts pointing through 270 degrees, the one that points due east says “SYDNEY 11,642 KM,” i.e. 7,234 miles. Here it is. Some wit has hastily added in thick black felt-tipped pen “LITHGOW 11,485.” The calculation is based on subtracting the distance of about 93 miles that separates Lithgow, New South Wales, from Sydney, and is therefore pretty accurate. The old coal-mining town of Lithgow (pop. 11,298) was named after William Lithgow, the first auditor-general of New South Wales, and is on the western edge of the Blue Mountains. Lithgow is notable for various other reasons, not least as place where Marjorie Jackson grew up, “the Lithgow flash,” who at the Olympic Games in Helsinki in 1952 won gold medals for Australia in the women’s 100m and 200m athletic events, and was from 2001 to 2007 Governor of South Australia.

The Cape of Good Hope

The Cape of Good Hope is so laden with historical associations, so mythic, so much a part of the saga of Europe’s discovery of the rest of the world, that arriving there in person is almost absurd. One thinks of Bartholomew Diaz, reaching it for the first time in 1488 aboard the tiny caravel São Cristóvão, and naming it Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms—only to be corrected later by King João II of Portugal, in view of the infinite commercial potential of a new and viable sea route to India and back again: Cabo da Boa Esperança, Cap de bonne-espérance, Kap der guten Hoffnung, Kaap die Goeie Hoop, the Cape of Good Hope! One thinks of Vasco da Gama sailing by aboard the São Gabriel and pushing on past what is now the Eastern Cape and further up the coast, arriving on Christmas Day, 1497, and therefore calling the place Natal. One recalls the Flying Dutchman, forever doomed to tack and beat and tack again without ever passing beyond the Cape, its ghostly crew in perpetual torment. One also thinks of Admiral Elphinstone, General Craig, Commanders Hardy and Spranger, and their two fine battalions of Royal Marines, ordinary sailors, and men of the 78th Highlanders, who at the Battle of Muizenberg in August 1795 wrested control of the Cape from the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, and promptly dismantled Dutch instruments of torture, then destroyed the pieces. One thinks of resourceful Lady Anne Barnard, and her dim view of the Acting Governor, General Francis Dundas, and “the little politicks of our Lilliput court.” One thinks of Cecil Rhodes, financed by N. M. Rothschild and Sons, the diamond monopoly, and his fevered vision of a red stripe extending all the way from the Cape to Cairo. One thinks of passengers alighting at the Cape, repairing to the Mount Nelson Hotel for tea, then boarding a Union Limited and Union Express sleeper bound for Witwatersrand and Pretoria... On it goes. A couple of baboons, a few bad-tempered ostriches, a herd of eland, abundant zebra droppings, and a wealth of hazy schoolroom memories—after the Cape, to paraphrase Yeats, what more is possible?

The spoons

Photograph courtesy of David Murray, www.leopardantiques.com

Before Groot Constantia I collided with Cape silver at the slave lodge, one of the oldest buildings in Cape Town, a difficult place.

The British dealt with it by rolling their government offices over the top, and later the Supreme Court. However, the record-keeping of the Dutch was so meticulous that the ghosts are chillingly present. Hundreds, thousands of names survive: Titus, Hannibal, Scipio, Moses, Solomon—choices closely allied to the naming of horses and other livestock. Fortune, Aap, Pattat, Pickle Herring, Dikbeen van de Kaap (literally thick-leg): gestures of contempt. A more systematic method gradually evolved, which at least provided Abram Solena van Java, Ticia van Mosambique, Jabinoe van Zanzibar, Nasfoe van Batavia, Claas van Malabar, Matombar van de Rio de la Goa, Cupido van Bengalen, Paria van Bali, Walale Jerrirano, and Maas van Nias the benefit of some vestigial memory of place, which leaves Angala, Thaviemma, Kafisie, Marimoreo, Schkanaljar, Onbelatie, Lubbert, Bappa Saeya, Sidie, Sabienpoin, Nareloe, Ontong, Fortamij, Tauhite, Oemar, Ringe, Baakka, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... How do you make sense of the grim legacy of this building, and the evidence it furnishes of global displacement, misery, and death?

Photograph courtesy of David Murray, www.leopardantiques.com

I suppose it is redemptive, in a way, to scramble upstairs and discover something wholly beautiful, but upon much reflection afterwards, of course there is in this a ghastly paradox. The same colonial society that was capable of inflicting such unthinkable suffering upon innocent people, upon entire communities, purely for the benefit of the shareholders of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, could at the very same time produce a species of object that attests to the remarkable aesthetic judgment of its silversmiths, their sensitivity, their instinct for volume, shape, balance, and perfect proportion—spoons!

Photograph courtesy of David Murray, www.leopardantiques.com

Until then I had been wondering where in the Cape I would find any really substantial evidence of the earliest colonists’ aesthetic engagement with their remarkable surroundings—taking into account the ferocious Protestantism they brought from Holland, and their nose for business. Upstairs at the slave lodge, of all places, the penny dropped.

Photograph courtesy of David Murray, www.leopardantiques.com

Here are glorious basting spoons (“druplepels”), serving spoons (“opskeplepels”), and teaspoons (“teelepels”) by Johannes Combrink (ca. 1781–1853), Willem Godfried Lotter (fl. 1770–1810), and Marthinus Keet (fl. 1819–1860); sauce ladels (“souslepels”); soup ladels (“soplepels”), and mustard spoons (“mosterdlepels”) by Frederik David Waldek (b. 1808), Cadier Abdol (fl. 1847–1854), Dominique Baudouin du Moulin (fl. 1822–1833), Johan Voigt (fl. 1783–1791), Lawrence Twentyman (fl. 1818–1832), and Jacobus Johannes Vos (fl. 1800), all brought from the collection of the South African National Gallery.

I suspect the plainness and the general schemata were imported from Georgian and Regency Liverpool, but the sensuousness of the bowls, their sculptural flair, their generosity without “fatness,” to say nothing of the harmony of each transition from bowl to stem, the shapeliness of the whole article, its simplicity and refinement, the avoidance of embellishment, and the mastery over form—these set the Cape silversmiths apart. By any measure these men were major artists, but—really, seriously—who were they?

Hugh Trumble in Matjiesfontein

The week before last I went from Cape Town to Pretoria aboard the Blue Train. The journey takes about 30 hours, and the train stops only once, after about six hours, for passengers to stretch their legs for about an hour in a tiny hamlet on the edge of the Grand Karoo plateau, which looks to me an awful lot like the Wimmera, or, at a pinch, the Mallee.

The halt is called Matjiesfontein and there are a few old houses, some dusty-looking sheep, a defunct post office, a cricket pitch of sorts, some stables abandoned by the British army after the end of the Boer War, and a dear old “spa hotel,” the Lord Milner, with a public bar where the Blue Train people had arranged for us to have refreshments.

Bear in mind that these were the first premises in which I had set foot outside Cape Town, only four days after I arrived from London. I have never before set foot upon the continent of Africa.

In the bar there were a clapped out but functioning upright piano, a huge Edwardian cash register, a large clock that had stopped at half past six, and an assortment of ancient sporting and other team photographs hanging on the walls at either side of the front door, and on the short sides of the room, flanking the counter.

Those sporting team photographs included the Blair Lodge School first cricket XI for 1895 (in Polmont, near Falkirk in Stirlingshire, Scotland, about 20 miles from Edinburgh); the same school’s officer corps of cadets; the Nottinghamshire county XI for 1897; Major Barton’s Cape XI (date unknown); Lord Hawke’s South African XI (1898–99), and “the Australians (Seventh Team) 1890,” in which, on the left, wearing his trademark bowler hat, a very youthful but nevertheless unmistakable Hugh Trumble stands, our great-grandfather J. W. Trumble’s famous younger brother. Of course he does!

I couldn’t believe it, but yes: the relevant portion of the caption read: “H. Trumble.” There must be some algorithm relating to colonial populations, relatively high birth rates, patterns of descent, and the intercolonial and international Edwardian cricket enthusiasm that would go a little way towards accounting for this amazing coincidence. Even so, I was and am still completely astonished by it.

I have no idea how this rather fine group photograph found its way to Matjiesfontein in the Grand Karoo. Great Uncle Hugh certainly played with the Australian tourists in the Cape and Natal in 1902, but this was taken twelve years earlier. It’s a possible explanation, and at this stage the only one that is in any way viable. At any rate, it is in fine shape and so am I.

District 6

Distrik Ses, the sixth municipal district, was a busy, relatively cosmopolitan neighborhood of inner Cape Town, roughly bounded by the docks, the city, and the slopes of Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak. Generations of former slaves, “coloured” migrants, Malay and other Southeast Asian and indeed non-Asian Muslims, a fair number of Xhosa, a smattering of Afrikaners and other whites lived there in relative degrees of harmony, a fairly representative cross-section of the whole of South African society. In February 1966, under the notorious Group Areas Act (No. 41 of 1950), District 6 was declared whites-only, and forced removals were announced. Commencing two years later, and proceeding in well thought-out stages, by 1982 upwards of 60,000 people were removed to the desolate Cape flats, some fifteen miles away, and the entire locality bulldozed. Only places of worship were spared. Richmond, Arundel, Frere, Clifton, Ashley, Hanover, Tennant, Godfrey, Sidney, Ayre, Cannon, Clyde, Caledon, Queen, Phillip, Gray, Combrinck, and Pedersen Streets are no more. It is as if the whole of Carlton or Darlinghurst or Fortitude Valley had simply been obliterated. Today you may still make out quite clearly what was done, because there is a sizeable portion of absolutely vacant hillside right there in the middle of Cape Town, but a little ad hoc museum nearer the centre of the city has been salvaging the collective memory of those who once lived in District 6. A large map on the floor is gradually accumulating the marks and surprisingly detailed notes of hundreds of former residents. It is an immensely moving monument, because you may walk across it, gradually absorbing the many human dimensions of each and every pulverized street corner. Which alleys were one-way? Where did Mrs. Adams live, or Mr. and Mrs. Wessels, or Mrs. De la Cruz, or Dollie and Joe Buckingham, or E. Mosoet, or L. J. Williams, or Y. Abrahams, or Sarah Louw (Anderson), the Carrs, the Schroeders, or “Walker,” or “Patsy Harry (nee van Schoor, now living in Australia, born 11/11/54)”? Where were the fish and chip shop, the Cheltenham Hotel, or Globe Soft Furnishings, or the Sheik Jossai Primary School, or the Moravian Chapel? Exactly how many steps led up to the steep corner of Hanover Square? (Seven.) What was A. J. Parker’s five-digit telephone number at 48 Stone Street? Perhaps there is no better spot than this in which to begin to grasp the hopeless desolation of Apartheid.

Groot Constantia

The menu called it “the wine that seduced the crowned heads of Europe, consoled Napoleon in exile, and was featured in the novels of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Baudelaire [sic]. Produced from Muscat de Frontignan grapes, this is a bold, rich, honeyed wine without the botrytis usually found in this style...Former President Nelson Mandela has been known to enjoy this wine.” I copied it down in the dining car somewhere near Beaufort West, ordered a second glass, and made a mental note to go to Groot Constantia when at length I returned to Cape Town—and upon my return to New Haven, Connecticut, to check up on those wonderful but slightly improbable claims.

How delightful to discover that it is all quite true. Frederick the Great definitely drank it. So did King Louis-Philippe, the Prince Regent, King William IV, and Queen Victoria also. The order books have survived. Such was its fame, Constantia made it into successive editions of The Child’s Book of Knowledge (1828). On St. Helena Count de Las Cases supplied Bonaparte with “vin de Constance,” something that so irritated the Governor that the count was eventually ordered off the island. This cannot have led Jane Austen (in Sense and Sensibility, 1811) to make Mrs. Jennings recommend to the lovelorn Marianne Dashwood a glass of the finest old Constantia wine for “its healing powers on a disappointed heart.” (“My poor husband! how fond he was of it! Whenever he had a touch of his old cholicky gout, he said it did him more good than anything else in the world.” Elinor Dashwood drinks it instead.) I do wonder, though, if just conceivably De Las Cases actually got his bright idea from Mrs. Jennings, a suitably romantic twist in the otherwise hard-nosed commercial environment of the Cape.

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), “whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a-musing, his good mother took it to be an infallible sign that he ‘wanted support,’ the blooming old lady made all haste to the dining-room closet, to produce from it the support embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit,” definitely not a marie. In Les fleurs du mal, meanwhile (XXVI “Sed non satiata,” 1857), Baudelaire says he prefers the mouth of his lover over the fine vintages of Constantia, Nuits St. Georges, and opium: “Je prefere au constance, a l’opium, aux nuits, / L’elixir de ta bouche ou l’amour se pavane.” Too creepy.

The whole question is academic. The Klein Constantia that Frederick, Napoleon, Prinny, Louis-Philippe, Austen, Queen Victoria, Baudelaire, and Dickens knew, or thought they knew, was obliterated at the end of the nineteenth century by the scourges of, first, oïdium, swiftly followed by phylloxera. The wine we drink today is a reconstruction, though certainly a delicious one.

Alas, this great house of neighboring Groot Constantia burned to the ground in the 1920s, so it too is a reconstruction, but very effective and moving nonetheless. But for a grumpy alpha male baboon, I was quite alone there.

The well-proportioned rooms are kitted out with mostly Cape Dutch furnishings in yellowwood, beefwood, satinwood, Burmese teak, amboina, ebony, elmwood, mahogany, and stinkwood (I am not kidding), as well as various early colonial pictures that come from elsewhere, above all from the collection of Alfred de Pass.

And it is through the pictures that one question above all swims into vivid focus: How was it possible that a setting as physically spectacular as that of the Cape of Good Hope, and the incomparable profiles of Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain, Lion’s Head, Signal Hill, and the Twelve Apostles, consistently failed to lift the local landscape painters to more and better results? It seems almost perverse, but more often than not eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century views across Table Bay reduce these sublime features to the character of a lumpy hillock, or a small gravel quarry in Derbyshire. Even William Hodges seems to have had considerable trouble capturing the effect. Maybe that is the answer: Some places simply defy representation, unless you are Albert Bierstadt.

On the other hand, look at the glorious proportions and sculptural vigor of Groot Constantia. Not bad for a colonial farmhouse at the farthest edge of the globe. It is in places such as this that you discover what is surprisingly scarce in the Cape, namely an adequate receptacle of any sort of aesthetic excitement among the earliest colonists. Held in check by such austere forms of Protestantism as they brought with them from Holland, those industrious East India Company people seem to have channeled everything into built forms, mostly gables, perfectly-proportioned windows and shutters; Cape silver, and successive vintages of sweet Klein Constantia, thank goodness.

Egyptian geese

There is no need for an alarm clock in Cape Town. Egyptian geese do the job. Alopochen aegyptiacus is a noisy creature, and busy. A pair alighted in the Aleppo pine right outside my hotel window well before dawn on the first day, honking for South Africa. Later, in the Company Gardens, I watched with real admiration as a mother Egyptian goose herded her brood of fluffy goslings into the rose garden to demolish the iceberg patch, undeterred by baboons. But for me the Egyptian goose also rang a loud and persistent aesthetic bell. It is so obviously the same creature that found its way into the Old-Kingdom, fourth-dynasty mastaba of Nefer-maat (2613–2494 B.C.), who was a brother of the man responsible for building the great pyramid at Giza. After at least 45 centuries descendants of those famous “geese of Meidum” in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo are alive and well, and merrily shitting all over Cape Town.

The leopardess

If you have never ventured into the South African bush, or visited what is still soberingly referred to as a “game reserve,” it is difficult to grasp just how rich an experience it can be, even how transformative.

Sabi Sand in the Limpopo Province comprises 44,000 acres of high bushveld savannah, gently rolling country at either side of the Sand River, which rises in the Drakensberg Mountains, a distant but beautiful presence. The property is contiguous with the western boundary of the Kruger National Park, not so far from the border with Mozambique, and scores of wild animals move freely back and forth. At this time of year, the southern winter, the land is dry, brown, and crackly, very much like Australia Felix—the days are warm and sunny, the nights cold.

In the absence of lush foliage, you can often see across long distances, which is handy for encounters with especially reticent creatures, but animals big and small are so numerous, and so familiar with the careful movement of land rovers, that all you really have to do is sit there with your binoculars and before long pretty much everything ambles, trots, stomps, skitters, flaps, or slinks casually by. It is simply amazing—a place teeming with every conceivable form of life. The best analogy is Eden. Indeed whoever drafted Genesis must surely have known a landscape like Sabi Sand, all set about with fever trees.

During my visit of four days, comprising three-hour dawn and dusk expeditions led by Shelley, our expert guide, a young New Zealand expatriate equipped with a loaded rifle, and Emmanuel, our dependable tracker, we met with a dazzle of well-fed zebra and a journey of giraffes, the latter with incomparable eyelashes; a crash of dogged white rhinoceros, who evidently double as a taxi service for meticulous side-stepping red-billed oxpeckers; herds of sensitive nyala, graceful impala, swaggering kudu, and big shaggy blue wildebeest; cheerful waterbuck, bushbuck, nimble grey duiker, and watchful rock-dwelling klipspringer. There were four busy warthog piglets, trotting along behind big-bosomed mother warthog, their tails pointing straight up. She reminded me of late-career Melba.

There were lissome tree squirrels, cheeky vervet monkeys, and a troop of unscrupulous chacma baboons. A herd of massive Cape buffalo ambled by, restively—the only creatures at length I found truly frightening. Unstoppable elephants patiently carried forward their project of deforestation, in particular a large bull without tusks who with the tip of his trunk gingerly sampled a waterhole with absolutely disarming fastidiousness, while at the same time producing an enormous erection.

There were crested barbets, forked-tailed drongos, helmeted guinea-fowl, grey go-away birds, a stately goliath heron, a black-winged stilt, sacred ibis (scooping and sifting through the mucky reed-beds), primevil red- and yellow-billed and trumpeter hornbills, Cape turtle-doves, sumptuous lilac-breasted rollers, a little exhibitionist bee-eater, and a clan of spotted hyenas with two suckling pups. We had seen the mother a day earlier, standing motionless upon a rise, the epitome of statuesque, her broad forequarters the equal of any carved in alabaster with wings on the gates to the citadel of Sargon II.

For two nights fleet-footed hippopotamus, including the baby hippo with a very hairy nose, munched determinedly right beneath my window, tossing confident grunts to relations up and down the river.

I saw a scrub hare, a woodland dormouse (enchanting), an African civet, a hefty marsh terrapin, a pair of hyperactive dwarf mongooses, a coy side-striped jackal, several single-striped mice, bats, ostriches, rainbow skinks, and the distinctive tracks of an especially reclusive aardvark.

After some considerable searching, we caught up with two young male lions, yet to grow their manes, one comforting the other, who had lately been badly hurt in a scuffle maybe with a hyena. However, I suppose it is the leopardess who will stay with me long after the whole spectacle recedes.

She was stalking something, and stole out from behind a termite mound—just like that. Silent as the grave, and as smooth as plush silk velvet, she proceeded without the slightest hint of urgency, actually hugging the three sides of our vehicle that stood between her and some intriguing fragrance farther distant. Her paws were as big as my head, her shoulder-blades undulating with metronomic precision. Her coat was paler than I had imagined it might be, and her gait was indescribably beautiful. The rear pads trod exactly into the rustle-free spots carefully discerned by the fore. She then reclined for a few minutes with the effortless authority of a queen-empress, and that was when I took this photograph. She has a seven or eight-month-old cub back near the lodge. Evidently leopards live with constant hunger, but you would never know. It is especially odd, therefore, that she can maintain such superb disdain for the assortment of human amuses gueules perching fussily in our (open) truck, but maybe we hoist too many olfactory question marks over the subtle mind of Panthera pardus.

As if to amplify an already intense experience up to the point of dizzying sensuality, a full moon rose on the second night and shed its cold light over the Drakensberg Mountains, the river flats, the gentle slopes, creek beds, copses of leadwood and marula and thickets of spiky acacia.

The Italians talk about mal d’Africa, literally Africa-sickness, and now I know exactly what they mean. I’m going back.