52 
SALT RIVER. — COUNTRY WAGGONS. 
31 Jan. 
flowers, boiled, make a dish which may, in taste and appearance, be 
compared to spinach. The country about this spot is quite level ; the 
bushes and frequent eminences of sand, not interrupting the general 
flatness of the view. The distance is not more than three English 
miles from the town, the houses of which continue in sight from 
every part of the road ; Table Mountain, the Devil's Mountain, and 
Lion's Head forming always the most conspicuous feature of the 
landscape. This scene afforded me a characteristic, though not a 
picturesque, subject for a sketch. 
On this road, waggons are constantly passing to and from the 
distant parts of the colony ; although the month of March, on ac- 
count of the rains which then fall, and produce a supply of pasture 
along the road for the numerous passing teams of oxen, is the time 
when the greatest number of country waggons arrive in Cape Town. 
Their appearance, drawn by eight or ten to sixteen oxen, the fore- 
. most pair led by a Hottentot, who, if a young boy, is often quite 
naked, together with the immoderately long whips, and their loud 
cracking, presents to a stranger a novel and amusing sight. The 
length of the stock and thong of these whips, is no less than thirty 
feet, and sometimes even more. A boor considers the driving-seat 
as a post of honor ; but the ofiice of leading the oxen, is thought too 
degrading for any but Hottentots and slaves, the colonist never per- 
forming it but in the greatest necessity, and then only in the more 
dangerous parts of the road. 
As the boors often stop but a single day in Cape Town, though 
they have, perhaps, come the distance of a twenty days' journey, they 
very frequently unyoke, or outspmi, as it is called, at Salt River, to be 
ready to enter the town by day-break the next morning, or as soon 
as the barrier gates are opened. By commencing the business of the 
day at this early hour, they contrive, generally, to sell the produce 
they may have brought with them, and to purchase all they may be in 
want of, in the same day, and immediately quit a place where their 
oxen would soon starve for want of pasture. 
This want of pasture around Cape Town is a serious inconvenience ; 
and, in other respects, the situation of the chief town of the colony, 
