Pringle and his companions made their way on horseback through Stellenbosch and Fransch Hoek and over the Hottentots Holland mountains. On the third day of their journey, 10 October 1824, they reached the pioneer Moravian mission station Genadendal, or as Pringle headed his letters, in the German spelling, Gnadenthal, the ‘vale of grace’.

‘In distant Europe oft I've longed to see this quiet Vale of Grace’, Pringle wrote in his sonnet a month later. He had met Bishop Latrobe through his friend and mentor the Revd Alexander Waugh in London and doubtless knew the heartwarming story of the revival in 1792 of Georg Schmidt's original station, closed down by the V.O.C. authorities in 1739, and of its progress, set in an idyllic mountain landscape. In African Sketches he recalled hearing, as they approached the village, the ‘voice of sacred songs…ascending from the rustic chapel, in the midst of its venerable grove of oaks, harmonizing finely with the Sabbath-like seclusion of that beautiful spot’. They enjoyed all day the ‘sweet repose of the scene’ and the ‘good missionaries’ … characteristic courtesy’ among their ‘Hottentot disciples’.

An introduction from Latrobe, who had visited the mission in 1816, and his own sojourn in Enon with Robert Hart in 1821 made Pringle specially welcome then – and later after disaster had befallen him.

They were some twelve kilometres on their way east next day when Pringle's horse, ‘being bit or snapt at by an ill-mannered cur, in passing a boor's place…I was thrown violently from my saddle to the ground and had one of my thigh bones fractured’.