During the last flood in the Karoo, when the road through Meiringspoort was washed away, a mermaid became dislodged from her home in the bottomless pool and floated from the poort.
From one day to the next, the story was just there. Everyone in Prince Albert knew it, and everyone knew she’d been carted off to Oudtshoorn, where she was being kept at the museum.
In cars they came - borrowed cars and shared cars. In bakkies and buses, they travelled in droves over the Swartberg Pass into the Klein Karoo.
They came to the museum, where the curator had heard the story too. Being a resourceful person, she had created a little mermaid display, the main focus being a dummy dressed up as a mermaid. The people were furious, naturally. They felt cheated. All that way and they’d been tricked.
But of course, the point is, floods come and go through Meiringspoort. The mermaid would never have been silly enough to be washed away. She must still be there, safe in the bottomless pool at the foot of the waterfall.
In the lazy, buzzing heat of midday in the Groot Karoo, I listen to stories in the guesthouse kitchen, darkened to keep out the heat. With great care – there is, after all, no hurry – I slice the tomatoes very thinly. Reddened to bursting point, they are still warm from the garden.
I add a few cubes of fresh herb feta, which I cycled to fetch from Gay’s Dairy, just down the road. I spread it all liberally with olive paste, bought just yesterday from Jan Olyf. (There are two "Jan"s in Prince Albert – Jan Olyf, who owns the olive farm and Jan Groente, who farms vegetables.)
Lastly, I cut thick, crusty slices of Tante’s home-made bread, which I found at Sampie’s farmstall this morning, on the way to the dairy. There’s fig konfyt for after, or apricot jam if we prefer, bubbled on the great stove straight from the trees outside.
There is nothing dour about the people of the Karoo. Slightly fey, they are full of the legends of their odd, alien landscape. Sensuous about their food, they take the goodness of their fertile soil very seriously. But never for granted. Drought, floods and heat are never far from thought or conversation.
Staying for a week, I am accepted without fuss into the fabric of things. Greeted each time I cycle through town, I divide my day between the dairy and the farmstall, and the market on Saturday for sundried fruit and cheese from the cheese farm.
It is early one morning that I arrive, dropped unceremoniously by the Trans-Karoo train at the desolate Prince Albert Road station. "Why d’you want to come here?" asks a steward anxiously, helping me down in my impractical Jo’burg shoes.
The train has been less an adventure than a nostalgic experience. Roast chicken or beef curry in the dining car, served by white jacketed stewards. Windows which I have opened wide to catch the lightning lacerating the darkening sky. Red-brick clusters of squat houses, dogs panting on kitchen steps. And young girls strolling arm-in-arm through villages – church spires white; terra cotta walls glowing reddish in the late afternoon.
I have woken early, before the heat, to olive-green scrub and windmills, watched over by beetling mountains. And suddenly we are there – the middle of nowhere.
"Are you sure you’re okay?" the steward asks again. But then we spot the solitary bakkie. Elzane, who offered to fetch me, waiting patiently with a pile of books from the village library.
"See the gap in the Swartberge," she says, as we meander over scrub-cluttered undulations. "When this was all sea, that was where the water flowed out."
Prince Albert is 42km from the station, being older than the railway. It was the bushmen who lived here first, until the first loanfarms were granted in 1762. Besides its famed mohair, the town is best known for its dried fruit. "In the old days, the farmers fetch a stock each winter. It was a staple form of vitamins."
And each year, she tells me, Prince Albert has an olive festival. "Well, every town should have a festival, shouldn’t it?"
As we drive into town, past the Victorian hotel and the shuttered cottages, the church bell strikes seven.
Elzane runs Granny’s House, the Victorian guesthouse I’m staying in. After breakfast, the apricot farmer from across the road wanders over to advise us on our apricot trees. Already I feel a sense of constancy here, even belonging.
Christiaan, who pops in later, seems to fill the kitchen. A fifth generation Prince Albert farmer, he knows every rocky outcrop, every vygie, every bird and every spoor in the area. Before he leaves, we agree that he should take me down to Die Hel the next day.
I have always been fascinated by tales of Die Hel; of its small community – descended from a party of trekboers – who were isolated by the Swartberg until a road broke through in 1962.
Said to speak an archaic form of Dutch, they were almost self-sufficient. But once a month they would haul their dried fruit to Prince Albert by donkey, in return for provisions like sugar and tea.
"The people never liked the name Die Hel," says Christiaan. "An old stock inspector called it that because it was ‘Hell’ to get there. We call it Gamkaskloof."
The Swartberg pass is cut between immense red and white cliffs of stubbled rock, wrenched and twisted upon itself by some inconceivable cosmic force. A primeval landscape of cliffs enfolded on themselves in an intensity of pressure.
Sly sugarbirds flit among the brilliance of King Proteas. The heathery fynbos drifts green and yellow in the breeze.
"The eagle hunts with the sun on his back . . ." says Christiaan, shading his eyes and pointing to the krantz where an eagle nests. ". . . so the dassie must look into the sun. But the dassie has a membrane over his eyes so that he can."
We pass Eerste Water and Tweede Water, the two places the road crosses the stream. The Swartberg Pass was built in the 1870s by Thomas Bain and a group of convicts
Every year, following the road’s completion, the district’s farmers would gather at the roadbuilder’s base camp to celebrate New Year. Christiaan’s grandfather would play the concertina while they waltzed under the stars.
One year a woman brought her baby, who slept on the back of an ox wagon. As the people danced, they grew warmer and removed they coats. Midnight came and went and still people danced. Only when they came to leave did they find the coats had been flung over the baby, who had smothered beneath their weight.
"My grandfather never played the concertina again, from that day," says Christiaan.
We turn off on to the treacherous hairpin road down to Gamkaskloof. Below us, the valley is a stripe of brilliant green across the olive landscape.
"We found leopard spoor down here last week," says Christiaan, stopping to inspect the marks left by a dainty klipspringer. "There’s still plenty in the mountains. And lynx."
A party of baboons scatters as we reach the valley floor. Small cottages and a tiny school, built in 1928, lie in eerie desolation. Orchards, slightly overgrown, stand heavy with apricots, peaches, quinces and pomegranates.
Further along a couple of cottages have been beautifully restored and turned into guesthouses. We stop at a cardboard sign advertising tee-shirts, and there we find Annetjie.
"Honey beer? Ginger beer? A little tea?" she offers, showing us her two guesthouses, one with an outside oven, where she still bakes her bread. She lives in one of the oldest cottages – used as the school before the schoolhouse was built.
"I was born here, in this very cottage," she says, surprising me. "But when the road came, we children all went to Prince Albert to school. We never really came back, and eventually the old people all died.
"But, you know, when you reach your ‘50s you get an urge to go back where you belong."
Annetjie shows us the remains of an ancient car, carried into the kloof and along the river by 10 men, way back in 1958 – for the status of the thing, I suppose. They couldn’t have driven it in Gamkaskloof.
We picnic on Karoo lamb, pickled by Christiaan’s wife Hannie, on home-made bread and preserves, and of course olives from Jan Olyf.
The next day I travel back toward the station to visit Outa Lappies. Local artist and character, Outa is clothed in a stitched-together motley of multi-coloured lappies. His art, "something outa nothing" as the locals say, is created from a mix of tincans, feathers, bits of wood, slivers of mirror, broken pieces of china.
I find him beneath his tree, which is festooned with bright scraps. Outa has lived almost all his life out of doors, and he likes it that way. At the moment, he inhabits a ruined farmhouse, partly washed away in the last flood.
"Time for my children," he says suddenly, and in falsetto: "Babies, babies." He ambles across the yard, scattering seed. Clouds of birds, gathered on telephone wires, rise and land at his feet.
"This is how a person can be happy with the wild things. My father told me in ’29, when I was higher than his knee, he said: if you turn you hand this way – upward to beg – you become a slave. If you turn it to the earth, you become a man.
"I have made a life from my hands. Now I sell to people all round the world."
He is best known for his tincan lighthouses. But he can sell me nothing. This one is promised to the bank in town, for Christmas. That is promised to the Germans, and this is to fulfill an order from a Canadian.
He retrieves order forms and invoices – originating all over the world - from the sacks which hold his belongings. Among them are crumpled pieces of Outa’s life - stitched and embroidered on lappies - all scrumpled down inside the sacks.
"This is the book of my life," he says. "It has reached chapter 873 now."
One shows a Jo’burg street scene dated sometime in the ‘50s. "I dreamt I would go to Johannesburg," he said. "A place of houses and people and music. And it came true, when I was on my walking tour."
Another celebrates, in heartbreaking clarity, his great love - the wife who left him during his years away, walking the country and peddling his art. "These people like a husband who stays around."
One lappie shows their parting: "Your presents mean so much to me, much more than the loaves and fruit from each tree . . . This is my love for thee. Tomorrow I must leave thee. While I’m away please pray for me."
I left him then, crooning to his birds as evening fell.
There is something mystical about Meiringspoort; something unfathomable about the smell of sudden cold as the poort swallows you into its depths, where the sun cannot reach. I swim in the dark opacity of the bottomless pool – above me, a waterfall tumbling from a dazzling precipice.
There’s an old story about a Klaarstroom couple who attended nagmaal at De Rust. Worried about their children, ill at home with measles, they left after communion on the Sunday, to the dominee’s warnings of eternal damnation.
The next day their drowned bodies were found at Double Drift in Meiringspoort. A rock formation, very much like a divine finger, pointed directly down at them. In 1914, from that same rock, a man was found hanging – left destitute by the ostrich feather slump.
This evening, I walk the koppie trail behind the town, the sun flinging itself upon the sky in a final display of pink and turquoise rapture.
I search rather unsuccessfully for Prince Albert’s unique vygie, the Bijlia cana, found nowhere else in the world. But I’ve seen enough – windmills whirring quietly in the breeze; mountains sombre and ominous in the twilight. It’s enough to make me ravenous.
All the diners in the Karoo Kombuis seem to have seen me in the street. We do the "where we’re from" routine; and the local "where we were before we saw the light and moved here".
The Karoo lamb is beyond description. And after admiring the rose geraniums on my table, I am served geranium tea from the garden. Well, that’s it, as far as I’m concerned. Time to wend my way home.
So how come I, and other remaining diners, find ourselves bedecked in feather boas and the campest hats imaginable – brimmed and netted and beflowered? "Hats make you into different people," say owners Michael and Theuns. "We haul them out to cut through barriers."
And I suppose they do, since quite two hours later I am still sitting in my pink ‘40s creation, vamping a whole table of instant best friends.