Table Mountain National Park

Feel the wind first. On most days it comes off the ocean with a clean, salty edge, and it carries the smell of warm rock and wild herbs. Underfoot, the ground is grey sandstone, worn smooth in places and gritty in others. Look out, and the city of Cape Town lies spread below you, with the Atlantic on one side and the long curve of the bay on the other. Welcome to Table Mountain National Park.

The flat summit is the shape everyone knows. From the city it looks like a single wall of rock, almost level along the top, as if someone had cut it with a knife. Up close, it is far more broken and alive. There are gullies, boulders, small pools after rain, and low bushes that hum with insects. The highest point, Maclear's Beacon, sits just over a thousand metres above the sea.

The park itself is much bigger than this one mountain. It runs south along the Cape Peninsula, a long finger of land, all the way to Cape Point. It takes in beaches, forests, cliffs and rocky shores. The protected area was created in 1998, and today it sits inside a living city. That is rare. Very few places in the world have wild mountain land within sight of office towers and harbour cranes.

Now look at the rock beneath you. The top layers are sandstone, laid down as sand on the floor of an ancient shallow sea, hundreds of millions of years ago. Below that sits older granite and shale. Over time, the softer land around the mountain wore away, and the hard sandstone stayed. That is why the summit is so flat. The mountain is not a peak that grew upward. It is what was left behind when everything else was washed away.

People lived beneath this mountain long before any ships arrived. The Khoikhoi, herding people of the Cape, knew it by a name often given as Hoerikwaggo, usually translated as the mountain in the sea. Stand here on a misty morning and the name makes sense. When cloud fills the lower slopes, the summit seems to float above the water, cut off from the land below.

European sailors saw it too. Portuguese navigators rounded the Cape at the end of the fifteenth century, and the Portuguese sailor António de Saldanha is usually credited with the first recorded climb, in 1503. He is said to have gone up through Platteklip Gorge, the wide cleft in the front face that you can see from the city. Hikers still use that route today. It is steep, direct, and hard on the legs.

Here is the first surprise. The mountain is not only on the map. It is in the sky. In the eighteenth century, the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille worked at the Cape and mapped the southern stars. He named one small constellation Mensa, which means the table, after this mountain. It is the only constellation named after a feature on the Earth. So, in a sense, this rock has a copy among the stars of the southern sky.

You may notice white cloud pouring over the edge of the summit, like water over a dam. Locals call it the tablecloth. It forms when the strong southeasterly wind pushes moist air up the slopes, where it cools and turns to cloud. That same wind is called the Cape Doctor, because people once believed it cleared the city of dust and disease. Legend tells a different story about the cloud... more on that in a moment.

First, crouch down and look at the plants. This is fynbos, a word that means fine bush. It is the main plant life of the Cape Floral Kingdom, the smallest of the world's six great plant kingdoms, and one of the richest. Many species here grow nowhere else on Earth. Look for proteas with their large, tough flower heads, and thin restios that look like reeds. Fire is part of their life cycle. Some seeds only open after a blaze.

Now, back to that cloud. Local folklore says a retired pirate named Van Hunks used to sit on the slopes of Devil's Peak, smoking his pipe. One day a stranger sat down beside him and challenged him to a smoking contest. The stranger was the devil himself. According to the tale, they are still smoking today, and the tablecloth is their smoke. It is only a story, of course — but many Capetonians still tell it to their children.

Here is the second surprise. Watch the rocks for a small, round, brown animal sunning itself. This is the dassie, or rock hyrax. It looks like a large guinea pig. Yet scientists place it among the closest living relatives of elephants and sea cows. The link is in features like the teeth and feet, not in size. Please do not feed them. Human food makes them sick, and it changes how they behave around people.

Most visitors arrive by cable car. The cableway first opened in 1929, and the modern cars turn slowly as they rise, so everyone gets the full view. The ride is short, but the change is large. You leave the warm city and step out into cooler, thinner air, often with a sharp wind. On either side, two other heights keep the mountain company. To the east stands Devil's Peak. To the west rises Lion's Head, with its rounded top.

Take a moment now, before you move on. Listen to the wind across the stone. Look at the small plants at your feet, and then at the wide ocean beyond them. Weather changes quickly here, so keep one eye on the cloud. As you walk away, look back at the flat summit once more. It is the oldest thing in this city, and it was here long before any of us. It will still be here when the next tablecloth rolls in.