Captain Van Hunks gazed up at Table Mountain. From the stoep of his house in Cape Town he couldn’t see the clump of trees on the saddle of mountain where the sharp point of Wind Mountain, as it was called, was joined to the main flat-topped bulk of the mountain. He couldn’t see them but he knew they were there. It was a long hard climb to his favourite seat under those trees. When he was younger, he could have climbed up there easily. But he didn’t have time to spare in those days. He had been far too busy, sailing the seven seas and doing some sly pirating wherever he could. Those had been grand days!
‘Where are you?’ came a screaming voice which he knew far too well from inside the house.
He was here, of course, sitting on the stoep of the house in the sunlight, feeling in his pockets for a pipe to fill with his favourite tobacco.
‘I’ve found another of your evil-smelling pipes – under the bed!’ yelled the voice even angrier.
So that was where he had hidden it. Van Hunks was glad it hadn’t been lost. Still, he did wish he had found the pipe himself rather than his wife. He ambled inside to face the whirlwind.
‘Don’t think you’re coming in here!’ shrieked his wife. ‘Here’s your pipe. Take it away. Far, far away! I’m not having the filthy smell of tobacco smoke in my clean house. I’ve told you that before.’
Van Hunks sighed. Why was it that his wife disliked the fine scent of pipe tobacco? It was one of the great discoveries of mankind. Tobacco soaked in rum had a fragrance all its own. Even the cargo he had captured on the seas of the Spanish Main had never smelt as sweet! He captured the missing pipe, grabbed his wooden keg of tobacco and a flask of wine, and escaped outside. This sort of thing happened too often. In the winter, he would head for the nearest tavern where he could enjoy a game of dice. In summer, as it was then, he preferred a walk up the mountain where the air was quiet.
Toiling up the rocky path made Van Hunks think on things such as having married a wife with such a sharp tongue and a poor appreciation of tobacco scent. Then, as the whole spread of Table Bay came into view below his feet, Van Hunks started examining the ships at anchor.
From that, it was easy to let his memory slip back into his own sailing days – the deafening broadsides of cannon and flashing cutlasses, the looting and sinking, and the chests of gold. He chuckled wickedly to himself. There had been a time when he was the terror of the seas, a pirate as feared as Old Nick, the Devil himself!
There had been good company in those days, thought Van Hunks as he made his way towards the rock where he usually sat to have his uninterrupted smoke. But what was this? Someone else had reached the spot before him and was sitting on his rock under the shade of his trees. A stranger, wrapped up in a flowing black cloak, with a dark forked beard under his wide-brimmed black hat.
‘Good morning, Captain van Hunks,’ said a welcoming voice. ‘A lovely day for a smoke!’
‘You know my name?’ gasped Van Hunks, who was out of breath as well as amazed.
‘Oh, I know everybody,’ said the stranger. ‘Especially someone as famous and feared as yourself.’
Van Hunks allowed himself to be flattered. ‘At my time of life,’ he replied, ‘I prefer to make friends rather than enemies. Will you join me in a pipe of tobacco? This dark mixture is the way I like it. It’s right to my own taste, though I doubt if anyone else could smoke as much of it as I do.’ He patted his tobacco keg with affection.
‘That sounds a little like a boast,’ said the stranger, and his eyes seemed to flash fire – or was it just a glint of reflected light? ‘Where I come from we smoke a good deal. I think I could match you, pipe for pipe, and still have breath for more.’
‘A wager!’ shouted Van Hunks excitedly. ‘Will you take a bet on it with me?’
The stranger smiled, tilted his hat back just a little and somehow that smile sent a shudder through Van Hunks. His face was as dark and weathered as Van Hunks’ own and the mouth twisted in a cruel sneer. ‘A wager indeed! Let’s say … your soul against a ship full of gold that you cannot outsmoke me.’
‘Done!’ agreed Van Hunks, without really listening. In his experience, there was no mortal man who could ever beat him in a smoking contest. He emptied the contents of his rum-scented keg onto a flat rock and divided the tobacco into two equal heaps. ‘There, sir!’ he offered. ‘Help yourself.’
The dark stranger produced a curiously shaped pipe from a deep pocket and filled it with tobacco. Then, while Van Hunks was striking flint against steel from his tinder-box to light his own pipe, the stranger seemed to conjure sparkling fire out of midair with a snap of his fingers.
Smoke started to curl from both pipes. The contest had begun. A long long silence followed. Just occasionally a throat was cleared or a pebble was stirred as one or another of the two smokers reached for another pinch of Van Hunks’ tobacco.
The sun hid itself behind Lion’s Head, voyaged around the world, and reappeared to welcome another day far away beyond the peaks of the Hottentots Holland. Its rays lit up the growing cloud of smoke wreathed around Table Mountain, for Van Hunks and the stranger were still sitting there smoking. The cloud poured over the edge of the mountain where the wind greeted it with delight.
In her Cape Town cottage, Van Hunks’ wife latched the diamond-paned windows tight shut. ‘What a south-easter!’ she exclaimed and wondered, just for a moment, what had become of her husband.
He was busy, enjoying a smoke as satisfying as he could ever remember. In a fit of unusual generosity, Van Hunks offered his flask of wine to the stranger. He was quietly amused to see how eager the stranger was to accept a drink. ‘Throat dry?’ asked Van Hunks with a smile. The stranger said nothing, but he coughed a little and eased his black hat back from his red, sweating forehead.
As the day continued and the clouds of smoke poured increasingly down the mountainside, even Van Hunks began to feel hot and sweaty. But by then the figure beside him had turned first red, then pale, then green with sickness. The moment came when he fell helplessly off his rock seat.
‘Fire and brimstone!’ he exclaimed. ‘My lungs are alight!’ And as he lay back, his hat slipped off his head. There, clear for Van Hunks to see, were two sharp-pointed curling horns.
‘You’re … Old Nick himself!’ gasped Van Hunks. ‘The devil in disguise!’
Then the coat, hat and boots disappeared in a flash of lightning! Beside him stood the ruler of hell with forked tail and cloven hooves!
‘I’ve won!’ crowed Van Hunks. ‘Now for my reward. I’ve beaten the devil himself.’
But that dark gentleman does not like to be beaten. Thunder rolled, the clouds closed in. And when the wind next blew the clouds apart, there was nobody there – only a scorched patch of turf around the rock where Van Hunks had been sitting.
Believe it or not, that is the tale. Ever since, when thick, white cloud lies like a tablecloth on Table Mountain and the south-easter blows through the town below, folk look up and say to each other, ‘See – old Van Hunks and the devil are at it again!’ And what was once known only as Wind Mountain is now always called Devil’s Peak.
Table Mountain
This flat-topped mountain, flanked by Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head, is probably the most famous landmark in South Africa. Its highest point, Maclear’s Beacon, is 1 113 metres above Table Bay, and the sandstone mountain is home to 2 600 different species of indigenous flora. Climbers have found about 350 different ways to the top, though most visitors prefer to use the cable way (built in 1929) which lifts over a quarter of a million people each year to the top. South of Table Mountain, the Cape Peninsula stretches down to Cape Point – ‘the most stately thing and the fairest Cape’ which the voyaging Sir Frances Drake ever saw.