This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

20th October 2007

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A few years ago, I told a friend that I was going to the Cederberg for the first time. He gave a curt reply: “I hope you like rocks.”

Well, I do like rocks, but – as I know from spending a lot of time as an undergraduate around pick-wielding geology students – I don’t like them that much. So when my wife and I turned off the N7 midway between Clanwilliam and Citrusdal and headed east on the kind of gravel road that Japanese automotive engineers definitely didn’t have in mind when they designed the Toyota Tazz, we weren’t quite sure what to expect.

Hugging the right-hand side of a steep embankment, we admired the signs of agriculture in the valley below. We drove through the occasional copse of conifers and congratulated ourselves on solving the riddle of the curious spelling of Cederberg: a combination of the English “cedar” and Afrikaans “seder”. The trees that give the region its name are dying out, but for the last 20 years or so conservation efforts (including the marking off of a Cederberg Wilderness Area) have had some success, with up to 8,000 saplings planted each year.

We passed a sign indicating a turn-off to camping grounds in Algeria, and thought perhaps we’d gone too far. As we learned a few days later, the camp in question was dubbed after that north African country by one Count de Regne, a well-travelled French nobleman who was in charge of forests under the Cape Colony – figure that one out – and who found the Cederberg topography remarkably similar to what he had seen in the Atlas mountains.

I haven’t been to Algeria, but at least I now know that it isn’t all desert. The Cederberg may be barren in places, but bone-dry it is not. As we discovered on that first visit and have confirmed on subsequent trips, it is surprisingly fertile, and can even be lush; numerous rivers and streams have their sources in the surrounding mountains, feeding an abundance of wild flora. They also sustain an ecosystem of grazers and predators – a variety of buck and (rarely seen) leopards, wild cats and foxes.

Further along the road from Algeria, at Dwarsrivier, is South Africa’s highest winery: the Cederberg Private Cellar, with vineyards growing at over 1,000 metres above sea level. The cellar produces, as winemaker David Nieuwoudt puts it, “wines with altitude” (the Nieuwoudt surname is inseparably associated with the area – they have been farming the land since the nineteenth century).

All this fecundity does not mean, of course, that the comment about rocks wasn’t accurate. There are rocks. Lots of them. But my friend didn’t mention that these are no ordinary rocks: millennia of heat, cold, wind and water have weathered the sandstone into a work of art on a grand scale, with innumerable free-standing boulders and columns shaped as intricately as any sculptor could wish.

At Sanddrif, near Dwarsrivier, there is a rough field of bizarre but beautiful outcrops. It is, truly, a lunar landscape; or, especially at sunrise and sunset, when the horizontal light makes the rock formations burn a deep red, one might even say it is Martian. Either way, it’s not of this planet.

The Cederberg stretches, north to south, across more than 100 kilometres of rugged terrain, but if you’re willing to do some driving (or, if you have the time and energy, some hiking), all of its various attractions are accessible. Some are even conveniently close together. Around Stadsaal, for instance, you can see rock art of all kinds.

The more moving and historically significant kind is Neolithic cave painting. Most South Africans are aware of the artistic inheritance left to us by our Khoi-San or “Bushman” predecessors, whose ageless murals (in ingenious natural media, ranging from animal blood to plant juice) depict a variety of subjects, human and animal, through a keen observation of detail and the strong influence of myth and ritual. What most South Africans don’t know is that there are, literally, hundreds of these paintings in the Cederberg area. Many of them are located near the place now known as Stadsaal, which is the site of other human wall-marking activities that are less profound and less historically significant, but still interesting.

The Afrikaans word stadsaal could simply refer to the impressive size and design of the main cave which, like any good city hall, is the most impressive of the various surrounding “buildings” in this wide complex of caves. It also, however, refers to the fact that this was a common meeting place over the years – it’s the perfect site for a clandestine bosberaad – and many of those who met here scrawled their names on the wall. In between the more recent graffiti, there are names of Boer generals and, half a century later, those from the National Party and Broederbond elite who were amongst the “architects” of apartheid. The latter, ignominious association would taint the place, but the caves themselves are so impressive that they dwarf the rather pitiful human attempts to achieve an impossible permanence.

For hikers, the highlight of a trip to the Cederberg is without doubt the walk to Maltese Cross, a huge, top-heavy sandstone column that is even more improbable than the famous (and now collapsed) God’s Finger in Namibia. After a gentle first few hundred metres through thick fynbos, the path quickly becomes an invigorating climb up a sharp rise. Walking to Maltese Cross, the odd combination of a romantic Mediterranean name and the mysterious heights of the southern African setting generates a series of associations in my mind. The Knights of Malta. Druids and wizards. Some ancient Celtic god, it seems, scattered the landscape with great rocks: giant square runes of boulders, massive cthonic pillars. Thixo, I wonder, are you hiding in these stones?

After a couple of hours, as we gain the top of the ridge, a wide plateau stretches away until, in the distance, we see our goal. The distinctive outline – which does not actually form the eight-pointed Maltese Cross of the middle ages, but makes more of a contracted capital T – lends itself, like an ambiguously-shaped cloud, to symbolic interpretations. My first thought is: Thor has dropped his blacksmith’s hammer, driving the handle deep into the earth. Then, amidst the sparse bushveld scrub – blackened by recent fires – it seems like a mushroom cloud, the geological cipher of some unknown apocalypse. Someone suggests a baobab tree, or an oak. If so, it’s an oasis of stone in a wilderness of rock, with brittle birds nesting on grey branches with grey leaves.

We walk on, into the shadow of this strange phallus, its angular tumescence looming over us. Closer still, an unexpected symmetry suggests a castle turret, soldiers surveying the medieval world from behind stonemasoned battlements. The ground is rough, the day hot, the wind fierce. Thorns scratch at our legs. The air is dry, but green fingers stretch across the plain, indicating furrows of fresh water. Now the great rock resembles an arm ending in a fist, rising to punch the air, defying the dust and praising the streams. Like Biko or Mandela, it seems to proclaim: There is life here. Strength, brother; peace; fight, brother, if you must.

That was the first time I saw the Maltese Cross. My overactive imagination was probably fuelled by the fact that it was Easter Sunday. Equally, it could have been the arid conditions, after a long Western Cape summer without rain. But I’ve been there again since, on less exalted days, to see the Cross under winter snow and spring thaw – and each time it has the same effect on me. Like so many of the Cederberg’s extraordinary formations, it has a talismanic power that brings visitors back again and again. Even those who don’t like rocks.