Drakensberg: Bury my heart above the Grindstone Caves

Today, Wordsworth is the poet whose relationship with the Lake District most endures in the public mind. But of the two, Coleridge, known to friends as “STC”, was the wild one, the poet whose descriptions were most fierce, unconstrained and filled with the sheer joy he felt in nature’s surrounds. 

For example, in a letter written in 1802, Coleridge described climbing, ledge by perilous ledge, down from Scafell mountain and how at the bottom he “lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight” at “the sight of the Crags above me on each side, and the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly and rapidly northward.”

The feelings Coleridge recounts may be two centuries and 10,000kms away from the feelings that come over me each time I return to our Ukhahlamba/Drakensberg mountains, and the Injisuthi area in particular, but the thrill and the fear he describes are still achingly familiar. They are testimony to the enduring power and permanence of unspoilt nature.

Allow me to try and write you into its wonder. 

I love Injisuthi because it’s off a beaten track, literally. Unlike parts of the ‘Berg where tourism, timeshares and expensive hotels, even when sensitively constructed, have edged up against the mountains, Injisuthi lies at the dead end of a winding 30km road through the sprawling village of Loskop; man and domestic animal slowly give way to the mountains, their flora and fauna.

I love Injisuthi because it sits at the confluence of a myriad of immature rivers, tumbling down valleys, carrying water as yet unpolluted and clean to drink. This year, after the heavy La Niña-induced rains (perhaps the last for a number of years), the streams were swollen, charging down every indent they could find; new and old waterfalls could be seen falling off numerous cliffs. 

Water falls off the sandstone cliffs of the Little Berg. Image: Mark Heywood

The unusually swollen Injisuthi river at the point where the path divides down three valleys: to Centenary Hut, Marble Baths and Battle Cave. Image: Mark Heywood

At night the sounds of the rivers are as loud as the sea. 

I have visited Injisuthi when it is burnt, brown and bare after winter fires. But this year it is bursting with a hundred hues of green, tangled, overlapping, a whole ecosystem under your feet: there are said to be 1,800 plant species in the Maloti-Drakensberg area, 350 of them endemic. But the most prominent are the trees (Yellowwood, dwarf Proteas, umTsitshi, Kippersol, Cycad to name a few). They dot hill and mountain sides apparently in competition to outdo each other with the patterns their boughs slowly, invisibly sketch out against the sky. The interminable slow stretch of tree tops and branches for the sun, whether from forest bed, cave or cliff seems like a metaphor of sorts for life. 

A great Yellowwood. Image: Mark Heywood

A burnt Protea drawing patterns against the sky. Image: Mark Heywood

Image: Mark Heywood

Image: Mark Heywood

Then, planting themselves determinedly on South facing mountain slopes are the last of the indigenous Yellowwood forests, probably not aware of their sole survivor status, unless we underestimate the sentience of trees and their communication systems. Which we probably do… 

I love Injisuthi because once you venture deeper into the mountains, you place yourself in the care of the gods. 

In the summer months the weather can change quickly and dramatically. What starts out as wisps of cloud smudging deep blue skies quickly balloon and burgeon. Looking up you literally see them boil: twisting, turning, darkening, in a dance to blot out the blue. Although this performance goes mostly unnoticed, for hikers they draw a veil over the towering basalt escarpment consuming the Triplets, the Buttress, Mahlabatshaneng, the Trojan Wall, the Old Woman Grinding Corn … draping the mountain passes you over-optimistically thought you would ascend the next day.

Mountains in the mist: now you see them … now you don't. Image: Mark Heywood

Mountains in the mist: now you see them … now you don't. Image: Mark Heywood

Image: Mark Heywood

Out of reach of the ubiquitous cell phone signal (a liberating but unnerving feeling), a few hours’ walk from help should anything go wrong, you are cut down to size: suddenly vulnerable, small and fragile, human. Big as we think we are, we are not. 

This feeling intensifies if you choose to stay overnight in one of the caves in the area. The Injisuthi area has several: Marble Baths, Lower Injisuthi, Grindstone and the Injisuthi Summit Cave.

This year we slept in Marble Baths Cave, its view of the escarpment obliterated by wandering clouds. 

In the morning I scrambled 200 metres up a steep grass bank above the cave, but couldn’t get above the cloud line. Visibility came and went and with it a fear of temporarily losing bearings and not knowing which side of the hill to descend. From a far distance mountain sides look benign, made up of a succession of gentle folds, crinkles and cliffs. But I’ve learnt through hard experience that when you are on them they are the boss. It’s easy to get lost and quickly exhausting. 

But it was a visit to Grindstone Caves that inspired me this time. 

Grindstone takes its name from a grindstone that you can find in the cave; it sits, unlabelled, unassuming amongst other rocks that are strewn on the cave’s floor. According to one guide, “it is a relic of the past. It does not appear to be of Nguni origin as it is round with a square hole in the center so was probably made by early Voortrekkers.” We noticed it by accident. It’s wonderful that it’s never been stolen. 

One feature that makes the cave unique is the cascade of water falling from its ceiling. It is one of a series of contour line caves forming a deep warm indent in the mountainside with views to die for.

The famous grindstone in a cave. It gives its name to high in the mountains. How or why it was carved there is not known. Image: Mark Heywood

The 'shower' inside Grindstone Cave. Image: Mark Heywood

 At night in the caves you return to your essence: it’s easy to imagine the San people who once inhabited these lands, hunting, gathering, painting. Focus, concentrate your thoughts, imagine and you can enter their minds. You are them if you want to be.

Finally, I love Injesuthi because it is both a wake and a celebration. An ecological after-tears. It’s what we could have been if we had understood the planet's own scheme of ubuntu: we can only be, because of the biodiversity of the earth’s ecosystems on which we depend; we are because they are. 

Meadows and mountains: the incredible smallness of being (human). Image: Mark Heywood

Meadows and mountains: the incredible smallness of being (human). Image: Mark Heywood

As we have plundered and eliminated that biodiversity we became lesser beings, even whilst we survive. But with a time limit now on human survival these hills will certainly outlive us. 

Realising this summons to mind the great poets of nature and the warnings that they began to issue several hundred years ago as they foresaw the devastation industrial capitalism would bring to nature. 

I started this reflection with Coleridge, the opium eater, but end it by calling upon his opposite, the far more ascetic Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poetry captures for me the sense of exultation brought on by this world. In God’s Grandeur, a strange poem for an atheist to end with, Hopkins writes:

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings." DM/MC/ML

Read more of Mark Heywood’s reflections on Bikes and Hikes:  

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-03-17-otter-trail-best-reasons-to-book/

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-12-17-the-hidden-treasures-of-the-wild-coast-and-how-to-make-the-most-of-them/

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-05-23-a-mountain-bike-race-like-the-great-kap-sani2c-can-raise-a-village-and-rural-education/

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-04-24-i-ride-what-i-like-thoughts-from-a-bicycle-on-states-of-nation/

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-04-13-this-is-the-sound-of-the-suburbs-a-bike-essay/

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-06-16-durban-north-beach-oh-i-do-like-to-be-beside-the-seaside/