Page 41 - Bulletin 8 2004

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The Cape Times
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THURSDAY, JAN. 18, 1883
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RAILWAYS, like the rest of things, seem to enjoy their law of evolution. They have
already reached a point at which their original purpose fades into the blue distance.
They carry to and fro still, but they do so much more that their first designation fails to
represent their many uses. If we called them flying hotels we should accurately describe
their latest development in many parts of the world. To sit in a “prospect car” and listen
to a band of music or enjoy a brilliant landscape, to promenade along a covered gallery,
to lounge in a news room, or pass from car to car in easy gossip, to breakfast and dine
and sup and go to bed, all this is in the programme of modern railway travelling. Life in
all its fullness may be carried out in the rapidly moving home. We have added to our
railway system a line whose raison d’etre is health and pleasure. And that line runs to
Kalk Bay, which for either of the purposes named is about as odd a place as could be
found in the atlas. But the air! the climate! Well, we will give full credit to the virtues of
the latter and its pleasant contrast to the atmosphere of Cape Town. But the fine air is
only one of the restorative forces, and we are not sure that it is the foremost. The mind
has its necessities as well as the body, and a pleasant stimulus to the former is, like
mercy, twice blessed in its action. True, the choice is not in every one’s hands; but
where it is, we believe, a week’s brisk movement through pleasant scenes will do more
to set a man up than a whole epoch spent in listless sojourn on a barren strand, like that
of Kalk Bay. Barren it is with a vengeance; for through the whole length and breadth of
the place there is not a tree from which a walking-stick could be cut, or green food
enough to make a sparrow’s dinner. There is but one road, and a sweet specimen it is of
its kind – straight, narrow and dusty, without even the pretence of a bend in its course or
an apology for a sidewalk – fenced by the hard mountain on one side and the harder
rocks on the other; it is nothing less than a long trough in which wagons and carts churn
up perpetually the dust and etceteras mixed with it. There is no alternative but the
shadeless rocks, over which only a gymnast can move freely, and upon which none but
barbaric tissues can rest and be thankful. No alternative; for through the entire length of
the village not a bench, or shed, or faintest hint of shelter is offered to yielding muscles
or much-baked occiput. A small purgatory tempered with ozone, where miserable
beings spend a month of every year doing penance for the sins of the remaining eleven –
such is the light in which the place has ever appeared to us. Who can have noted the
solemn sufferers, courting adamantine torture on their solitary rock-stools with faces set
steadily to a fixed point of the compass, without wondering what sins could be so
seductive as to be worth such fearful penance? All pain is relieved by sympathy, and a
fellow-sufferer discounts the worst of troubles. But the penitents we speak of suffer the
rod in silence, and isolation is the pickle in which the rod is steeped. Gravely let us ask,
what mental condition is it that is mended by swallowing such road-mixture as we have
hinted at, or staring at inaccessible krantzes, or testing one’s infirmities on the roughest
of rough rocks? We do not deny that Kalk Bay has potentialities, and very possibly it is
destined to be the great watering-place of South Africa. But it is a long way from