Some years before our author was at the Cape, there was seen on Table Mountain a bird as large in the body as a horse, having grey and black plumage. His beak and talons were like those of an eagle, but of a most dreadful size. He sat and hovered about that mountain for a long time, and the people were persuaded it was a griffin. It frequently carried off sheep and calves, and at length began to destroy the cows, on which orders were given to destroy it, and it was accordingly shot, its skin stuffed, and sent home as a curiosity to the Company. No such bird, has been seen since, and the oldest people of the colony do not remember to have heard of any such before.[5]
[Footnote 5: This was probably a stray Condor, and its size an ordinary exaggeration, in the passage of the story, like that of _the three black crows_.--E.]
Africa has been long famous for serpents, and there are such vast numbers of them in the neighbourhood of the Cape, that many of them have no names. Most of them are extremely venomous, and the colonists would suffer much more than they do from them, were it not that they have a specific remedy for their bites, not known in Europe. This remedy is the _serpent-stone_, allowed to be factitious, and is brought from India, where they are made by the bramins who have the secret of composing them, which they so carefully conceal, that no Europeans have hitherto been able to discover how they are made. The serpent-stone is about the size of a bean, white in the middle, but of a fine sky-blue on the outside. When a person is bitten by a serpent, this stone is applied to the wound, to which it soon sticks fast of itself, without the aid of any bandage or plaister. The part bitten begins immediately to swell and becomes inflamed. The stone also swells till it becomes full of the venom, and then drops off. It is then put into warm milk, where it soon purges itself from the venom, and resumes its natural colour, after which it is again applied to the wound, where it sticks as before, till a second time full, and so on till all the venom is extracted and the cure perfected.
All the mountains of this vast country are full of minerals and crystal, with many things of great value, if they could be got at; but the natives are so fearful of being made slaves in the mines, that they take all imaginable pains to conceal them. There is particularly a mountain, about 500 leagues from the Cape, called _Copper-mountain_, which is supposed to contain great quantities of metals. Large quantities of copper have been found here, which is said to contain a mixture of gold. Some Europeans endeavoured to follow the natives, who were suspected of going to that mountain to gather gold, but were all massacred. The Company is so tender of the colonists, and so unwilling to risk a revolt, that they have even neglected a gold-mine much nearer the Cape, the marcasites of which gave great hopes of its containing abundance of gold. Perhaps the Company may have another reason for acting in this manner, lest, if a gold-mine was discovered at the Cape, it might tempt the French or English to undertake something to their prejudice. Under its present management, the Dutch colony at the Cape is a general advantage to other nations, as well as to the Dutch. A few years ago a cavern was discovered in a mountain very near Cape-Town, in which the Hottentots find the venom in which they dip their poisoned arrows. There have likewise been found about twenty leagues from the Cape, some hot springs impregnated with steel, which have been found to cure many diseases, by using as a bath.