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Migratory San (Bushman) moved through but did not tarry, stopping only to leave a record of their passing in paintings on the rocks. But, it was the windmill that by 1883 had made permanent settlement possible, if not hospitable, in this place of extremes. And with the hardy farmers and their sheep, came prospectors and collectors, visionaries and eccentrics, hunters, explorers and adventurers, attracted by the vast expanses of aloe and acacia thorn, hills and forgotten valleys, open spaces and star-studded skies. Unlike the ubiquitous windmill, fifty kilometres north of the historic frontier town of Graaff-Reinet, tucked away among the foothills of the Sneeuberg, is a less evident testimony to the Karoo's extraordinary past. Angora goats grow fat on yellow grass. Sisal plantations shoot drunken Christmas tree stems towards the windswept sky and ancient mountains, worn-down by time, raise their weathered brows and balding domes to the skidding sun. The dusty road bends into a blue bowl of hills and kopjes and suddenly in a hollow lined in yellowing poplar trees and willows, the geese have the right of way. Complete with white roses in the churchyard, Nieu Bethesda is a little piece of England hewn from these African badlands. Since Athold Fugard, the South African playwright, immortalised Miss Helen in his play The Road to Mecca, a modern day pilgrimage to the Owl House has revitalised the town. When not travelling abroad, Fugard is the village's most acclaimed writer-in-residence and is something of a self-appointed curator of its main attraction. Attendant now upon the tourists visiting the Owl House are Victorian art and craft shops and aromatherapists and artists ply their trade in town. The camp site, set in a green field behind a large Victorian house fenced in white roses, boasts artistically arranged hay bales around an antique ox-wagon. The coffee shop owner across from the Owl House is Swiss. He came on a visit and fell in love, left to settle his scores with his old life and returned to start a new one in Nieu Bethesda. Such cosmopolitan creativity is a far cry from the deeply conservative, tight-knit community who would have been Helen's neighbours in this isolated corner of the African outback. | 
