Writing about his personal distress on departing Cape Town on the last of the great passenger liners he reflected on what the Cape meant to the first European explorers.

"Some four hundred and fifty years before, the great Camoes had seen the Cape vanish astern of a ship in which he was one of a handful of survivors of the original crew bound for home. He had sailed on from there over the same swinging water to write in his epic Lusiad what that journey and that view of the Cape had done to him. The powerful symbolism of his description, drawn from the kind of intuition of which I was thinking, bore witness to the Pentecostal nature of all art, and shone out as another and greater light than the one just extinguished on my own heaving horizon.

He wrote of the Cape personified as the last of the Titans, an image of the great natural forces that had fought the Gods engaged in their campaign to impose order on chaos, and to bring light to aboriginal night.

He it was, Camoes proclaimed, who had been Admiral of vast and hidden seas, and who had longed, over immemorial ages in his loneliness of power and natural duty, for the love of a white daughter of the Gods of the Sea. One night he saw her by moonlight, a nymph of snow moving in the smoke and spray of a phosphorescent swell, and he strode out with the stride of a giant to embrace her, when the Gods snatched her away. For that and for so natural an impulse, he was turned to stone and became that 'far-flung and much-tormented Cape', that 'Cape of Storms', as Camoes significantly renamed it again, rejecting the 'Good Hope' that his countrymen had tried so naively to make of it.

The accuracy of the presentiment embodied in this imagery, and the significance of intuition that could guide the spirit of man to the centre of its target over a range of four and a half centuries, was for me, in that moment, as awesome as it appeared miraculous. For what could be a more conclusive symbol of all that the mobilization of white empire, in Camoes' wake, had done to subjected peoples everywhere, than this imagery which clearly stated that a great natural heart in search of love had been turned to stone because of its denial of love by those who possessed the power to bestow it in abundance?