Narrative of the surveying voyages of his majesty's ships Adventure and Beagle (vol.3)

576 CAPE ov GOOD HOPE. June, 1836. four, six, and eight horses in hand, go trotting about the streets. I have as yet not mentioned the well-known Table Mountain. This great mass of horizontally stratified sandstone rises quite close behind the town to a height of 3500 feet : the upper part forms an absolute wall, often reaching into the region of the clouds. I should think so high a mountain, not forming part of an extensive platform, and yet being composed of horizontal strata, must be a rare phenomenon. It certainly gives the landscape a very pecu- liar, and from some points of view, a grand character. June 4th. — I set out on a short excursion to see the neighbouring country, but I saw so very little, that I have scarcely any thing to say. I hired a couple of horses, and a young Hottentot groom to accompany me as a guide. He spoke English very well, and was most tidily dressed ; he wore a long coat, beaver hat, and Avhite gloves ! The Hottentots, or Hodmadods aS old Dampier calls them, to my eye look like partially bleached negroes. They are of a small stature, and have most singularly-formed heads and faces : the temple and cheek-bones project so much, that the Avhole face is hidden from a person standing in the same side position in which he would l)e enabled to see part of the features of a European. Their hair is very short and curly. Our first day's ride was to the village of the Paarl, situated between thirty and forty miles to the N.E. of Cape Town. After leaving the neighbourhood of the town, where white houses stand as if picked out of a street and then by chance dropped on the open country, we had to cross a wide level sandy flat, totally unfit for cultivation. In the hopes of finding some hard materials for making a road, the sands had been bored along the whole line to the depth of forty feet, but without any success. Leaving the flat, we crossed a low undulating country, thinly clothed with a slight green vegetation. It was not the flowering season, but even at this time of the year there were some very pretty oxalises and mesembryanthemums, and on the sandy