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Back in the wilderness from which I'd been whisked, the mountains are five hundred million years old. They were around at the first stirring of the primeval soup from which man sprang so many zeroes later. Water once covered the antediluvian plains and traces remain in sweeping patterns on the rocks. Later, indigenous cedars covered the higher slopes. Slow-growing and aromatic, they gave the mountains their current name. Elephant, black rhino and lion ranged across the valleys and plateaus. The quagga and his cousins shared the plains. Their memory remains in ochre stains upon the rocky overhangs, painted by a people themselves one hundred and twenty thousand years old. A communal, nomadic people, the San followed the seasons and left their lives upon the rocks. Their stories, however, are difficult to read. Hunted by both black and white newcomers to their ancestral lands, the San were effectively exterminated. By 1910 their folklore was dead, their stories forgotten. The settlers had arrived in the Cederberg. The cedars made fine telegraph and fencing poles. Grazing lands made way for grain. Zebra was a popular hide for making grain bags and the quagga disappeared over the slippery slope, closely followed by his cousin the Cape Mountain Zebra. Down to a population of ninety-one in the 1950's the mountain zebra got lucky - luckier than his hapless cousin, at any rate. There are now some twelve hundred Cape Mountain Zebra world-wide and thirty of these are to be found at Bushmans Kloof in the Northern Cederberg, some two hundred and sixty kilometres from Cape Town. The zebras have come back to the mountains that were once their domain. Approaching through the sage and khaki bushveld, this private game reserve is as much a postcard oasis as it is an ecological one. Landscaped gardens of Wimbledon lawn run down to the river's edge and a rim-flow swimming pool merges with the river's horizon. It is a setting in which the reserve's celebrity guests (which have included the likes of the Bransens, the Thatchers and the Caines) would not feel out of place. | 
