the ocean. That far-off streak is the crown of an imposing rock, itself a monument of a memorable crisis in the annals of geographical discovery; it is the crest of Africa’s stony beacon, Table Mountain.
Out of the thirty-six days, from May the 26th to July the 1st, 1872, that I spent on board the “Briton” on her passage from Southampton to Cape Town,[1] thirty were stormy. For four whole weeks I suffered from so severe an attack of dysentery that my strength was utterly prostrated, and I hardly ventured to entertain a hope that I should ever reach the shores of South Africa alive. My readers, therefore, will easily understand how my physical weakness, with its accompanying mental depression, gave me an ardent longing to feel dry land once more beneath my feet, especially as that land was the goal to which I was hastening with the express purpose of there devoting my energies to scientific research. But almost sinking as I felt myself under my prolonged sufferings, the tidings that the shore was actually in sight had no sooner reached my cabin than I was conscious of a new thrill of life in my veins; and my vigour sensibly revived as I watched until not only Table Mountain, with the Lion’s Head on one side and the Devil’s Peak on the other, but also the range of
- ↑ Within the last few years the competition between the “Union Steamship Co.” and “Donald Currie and Co.” has reduced the length of the voyage from Southampton to Cape Town, viâ Madeira, to eighteen or twenty days.
