i6 
TRAVELS IN 
north, which opens into a wild and ahnost uninhabited part 
of the country. 
Though the mountains are rude and barren, nothing could 
be more beautiful, rich, or better clothed with vegetation, 
than the vale they enclose, which is well watered by the nu- 
merous branches of the Berg rivei, uniting in one stream 
about the middle, and meandering through it to the northward 
with a smooth and almost imperceptible current. This vale 
contains the divisions, or parishes, of Great and Little Dra- 
kensteen, Fransche Hoek or French corner, and the Paarl. The 
last of these is an assemblage of about thirty houses, disposed 
into two streight lines, and so far detached from each other 
as to form a street about a mile in length. The church stands 
near the middle. This, as well as most of the houses, is 
neatly covered with rye-straw thatch, which, if properly laid 
on, will last from twenty to thirty years. The houses are ge- 
nerally surrounded with plantations of oaks. The common 
size of these is from ten to fifteen feet in circumference, and 
from twenty to thirty feet in height without a branch : many 
are much larger : the tops are neither bent, nor is the wood 
shaken, nor twisted, as of those about Cape Town ; a proof 
that the winds are less violent in this valley than at the latter 
place. 
Fransche Hoek, and the two Drakensteens, have neither 
church nor any assemblage of houses that deserves the name 
of village, but are composed of detached farms, dispersed 
over the vale at considerable distances from each other. Most 
