When the south-easter gets up in summer, a white cloud builds on the far side of Table Mountain, spills over the top and pours down the face towards the city, dissolving as it falls and never quite reaching the streets. Capetonians call it the tablecloth. Anyone who grew up under it knows why it is there.

Jan van Hunks, so the story goes, was a Dutch pirate who had retired from the sea with his money and his pipe and settled in a cottage at the foot of the Windberg, the peak that stands beside Table Mountain on the city side. His wife could not abide the smoke. So every day he climbed the slope with his tobacco and sat on a rock high up, where nobody could complain, and puffed away at the view.

One afternoon there was a stranger on his rock. He was dressed in black, with a wide hat pulled low, and he had a pipe of his own. The two of them got talking, as smokers do, and the stranger let it be known that he had never met a man who could outsmoke him. Van Hunks, who had never met one either, proposed a contest. They filled their pipes and set to.

They smoked through the afternoon and into the night. They smoked through the next day, and the next. The cloud that rolled off them grew until it covered the mountain and hid the sun from the town below. Then, at last, the stranger turned green, coughed, and conceded, and in his coughing his hat slipped and Van Hunks saw the horns. There was a flash of light, and when it cleared there was nobody on the rock at all. The cloud stayed. The Windberg has been Devil’s Peak ever since, and whenever the tablecloth comes down, that is the pair of them, back for a rematch.

It is a fine story, and Cape Town has told it to visitors for well over a century. The written trail behind it is shorter than the telling suggests. The earliest place we have found it attached to the mountain is 1909, in a popular history of South Africa by the journalist Ian Colvin, who presented it as an old Cape legend, and that is why this entry sits at 1909 on the timeline. Colvin, it turns out, was leaning on a ballad called Jan van Hunks by the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, begun around 1847 and finished on Rossetti’s deathbed in 1881. Rossetti’s poem does not mention Table Mountain, the tablecloth or the Cape. It is set in Holland, and Rossetti had taken the tale in turn from a story called Henkerwyssel’s Challenge, printed in an English annual in 1829 and set in the town of Dordrecht.

The mountain, meanwhile, was already Duivels Kop on Dutch maps long before any of this was written, and nobody is sure why. One suggestion is that it began as Duifes Piek, the dove’s peak, and that a lazy tongue did the rest.

None of which is any use on a February afternoon when the cloud comes over the saddle and the wind is doing forty knots. Then it is Van Hunks, and he is winning.