inward. The necessary water for
the use of the town is brought down by pipes from the numerous
springs which trickle out of the granite cliffs of Table
Mountain, but there is never a sufficiency to spare for
watering roads or grassplots. This scarcity is a double loss
to residents and visitors, for one misses it both for use and
beauty.

Everybody who comes here rides or drives round the "Kloof."
That may be; but what I maintain is that very few do it so
delightfully as I did this sunny afternoon with a companion
who knew and loved every turn of the romantic road, who could
tell me the name of every bush or flower, of every distant
stretch of hills, and helped me to make a map in my head of
the stretching landscape and curving bay. Ah! how delicious it
was, the winding, climbing road, at whose every angle a fresh
fair landscape fell away from beneath our feet or a shining
stretch of sea, whose transparent green and purple shadows
broke in a fringe of feathery spray at the foot of bold, rocky
cliffs, or crept up to a smooth expanse of silver sand in a
soft curling line of foam! "Kloof" means simply cleft, and is
the pass between the Table Mountain and the Lion's Head, The
road first rises, rises, rises, until one seems half-way up
the great mountain, and the little straight--roofed white
houses, the green velts or fields and the parallel lines of
the vineyards have sunk below one's feet far, far away. The
mountain gains in grandeur as one approaches it, for the
undulating spurs which run from it down to the sea-shore take
away from the height looking upward. But when these are left
beneath, the perpendicular Walls of granite, rising sheer
and straight up to the bold sky-line, and the rugged, massive
strength of the buttress-like cliffs, begin to gain something
of their true value to the stranger's eye. The most beautiful
part of the road, however, to my taste, is the descent, when
the shining expanse of Camp's Bay lies shimmering in the warm
afternoon haze with a thousand lights and shadows from cloud
and cliff touching and passing over the crisp water-surface.
By many a steep zigzag we round the Lion's Head, and drop once
more on a level road running parallel to the sea-shore, and so
home in the balmy and yet bracing twilight. The midday sun is
hot and scorching