Edge of the Continent

On a still spring evening the air above the basin holds its warmth, and the smell of the sea comes in without hurry, carrying the salt of it and, somewhere under that, the oil and rope of a working harbour. Seagulls move without urgency. The red tower at the basin's edge was built in 1882 as the Port Captain's office, its clock brought from Edinburgh to mark the hours for ships entering Table Bay, and it has kept its position through every change the harbour has made since. The canal is quiet enough to hear a rope tap a hull. The mountain behind everything has been above this bay since long before the ships, before the office, before the clock, and everything arranged at its foot has had to fit around the rock. The air is warm and the water is flat and still. This is a place people keep returning to without quite being able to say what draws them, and the harbour, the old stone, the open sky above the basin, offer nothing by way of explanation.

The boardwalk descends toward the same water people have been arriving at for a very long time. In 1995 fossilised footprints were found in the rock at the water's edge here, former beach sand hardened over the millennia. They belonged to a woman who walked this shore 117,000 years ago, her height estimated at roughly 1.2 metres from the depth of the prints. She came to a lagoon fed by no river, only the sea. Langebaan is the only tidal lagoon of its kind in South Africa, and its salt marshes account for nearly a third of all the country's saltmarsh. Each year tens of thousands of birds travel up to fifteen thousand kilometres from their breeding grounds in Russia to feed on the mudflats, arriving in the same warm air that comes off the water on a spring afternoon. Two weathered rocks sit just out from the bank, shaped by the same slow work. People keep finding reasons to come here. The lagoon gives them nothing to explain and everything to feel.

Crush one leaf from the great trees in front of the homestead and the smell stays on the fingers for an hour, sharp and clean, a little like medicine, a little like rain on hot stone. Five camphors have stood here since Willem Adriaan van der Stel set them in the ground between 1700 and 1706, the oldest documented exotic trees in the country, under formal protection since 1942 and expected to live another century and a half at least. The estate that rose around them was raised by the labour of two to three hundred enslaved people, and everything they built has been ruined, remade, divided and restored, more than once. Through all of it the trees kept growing, a season's width at a time, the slowest and steadiest work on the property, their shade holding a coolness the open garden never reaches. Late in the afternoon a gardener knocks the soil from his boots at the edge of the lawn, one boot, then the other, and walks home under the branches.

The small whitewashed cottage at the edge of the field is built the old way. Clay plastered over a frame of wooden poles, lime-washed white every few years to keep the weather out, a method the early Dutch farmers adapted from the dome shelters Khoi people built from reeds and grass mats. Many small farm dwellings in this country were put up the same way, and the same way they are still patched and re-coated today. Somewhere a few hundred metres off, hidden by the run of the stubble, a pair of blue cranes is walking the field in their careful unhurried way. A pair will come back to the same farm for ten or fifteen years, often nesting within sight of the same patch they nested in last spring. The farmer who works this ground knows them by sight. Wind moves through the wheat in long even strokes. Far off, a bird calls once, and again, and a person standing at the gate hears it and smiles without knowing why.

A retired Prussian soldier called Werner, settled here on the frontier, looked at the koppie on the south side of the new town in 1801 and named it for the fortress that had guarded the city he had left behind, the Spandau Citadel of Berlin. The town below the koppie has been mostly left where it stood ever since. More than two hundred of its buildings, the old Cape Dutch homes, the slave cottages, the parsonages, are now declared National Monuments, the densest set of preserved buildings of their age anywhere in South Africa. Most of the preservation was paid for by Anton Rupert, the industrialist born here in 1916, who used part of his fortune for nothing more interesting than keeping his hometown standing. What Werner gave the mountain was a name. What Rupert gave the town was nearly two hundred years standing. By evening the streets here are quiet enough to hear what people are saying in their kitchens.

The bridge sways when people cross it, a slow lateral movement that reminds you how far above the water you are. The river below is dark — not from sediment but from tannins leaching out of centuries of leaf litter as the Storms River moves through the ancient forest above. The darkness is the forest made visible in the water. In 1964 this became Africa's first Marine National Park, proclaimed in response to an international appeal for governments to protect their marine environments. No fishing has been permitted here for over 60 years. Below the bridge the reefs hold up to 50 species of fish, along with rays, sand sharks and sea urchins. Tsitsikamma is one of the only places in the world with a formal underwater snorkel trail, laid through a protected bay at the river mouth. People come to walk the bridge. Below them, others are in the water. In the middle of the crossing, someone stops, grips the cable, and looks down.