on
On y tan-gue, on y tan-gue."

It only needed that. Every mind instantly conjured up the picture of a
vivid figure in a frock that gleamed blue as sulphurous flames. A
hysterical woman sprang up screaming shrilly, and had to be taken away;
a solitary sea gull, its plumage shining with a weird blueness in the
electric light, chose this moment to fly low along the deck, crying its
wailing cry. That was enough. Another woman began to scream; the
music stopped, and there was almost a panic to get away from a spot
that seemed haunted. In a little while the first-class deck was as
deserted as the deck of a derelict, and the ship was wrapped in
silence. The personality of the April Fool seemed more imposing in
death than it had been in life!

By morning the _Clarendon Castle_ had reached her destined port, and
lay snugly berthed in Cape Town docks. April, venturing out at the tip
of dawn to get a first glimpse of Africa, found that a great mountain
wrapped in a mantle of mist stood in the way. It seemed almost as if
by reaching out a hand she could touch the dark sides of it, so close
it reared, and so bleak it brooded above her. Yet she knew this to be
an illusion of the atmosphere, for between her and the mountain's base
lay the streets and little white houses and gardens of Cape Town. It
might have been some southern town on the shores of the Mediterranean
except for that mountain, which made it unlike any other place in the
world. The "Table of the Mass," the Portuguese named it, and when, as
now, silver mists unrolled themselves upon the flat top and streamed in
veils down the gaunt sides, they said that the cloth was spread for the
Sacred Feast.

April thought of all the great wanderers whose first sight of Africa
must inevitably have been the same as hers--this mysterious mountain
standing like a grey witch across the path! Drake sighted it from afar
in 1580; Diaz was obliged to turn back from it by his mutinying
sailors; Livingstone, Stanley, Cecil Rhodes, "Doctor Jim," all the
great adventurers, and thousands of lesser ones, had looked upon it,
and gone past it, to their sorrow. For if history be true, none can
ever come out from behind that brooding witch untouched by sorrow.
They may grow great, they may reap gold or laurels, or their heart's
desire; but in the reaping and the gaining their souls will know grey
sorrow. A rhyme of her childhood came unsolicited into April's mind:

How many