West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

He is arrogant now, swinging the propeller, laying his lean hands on the curved wood, feeling an exultant kinship in the coiled resistance to his thrust.

a strangled cough from the engine like the premature stirring of a sleep-slugged labourer.

Ahead of me lies a land that is unknown to the rest of the world and only vaguely known to the African — a strange mixture of grasslands, scrub, desert sand like long waves of the southern ocean. Forest, still water, and age-old mountains, stark and grim like mountains of the moon. Salt lakes, and rivers that have no water. Swamps. Badlands. Land without life. Land teeming with life — all of the dusty past, all of the future.

Time and distance together slip smoothly past the tips of my wings without sound, without return, as I peer downward over the night-shadowed hollows of the Rift Valley

I held the nose of the Avian on the beacons until the earth sped under her, and the wheels, reaching for solid ground, swept her onto the runway in a maelstrom of dust and flickering orange light.

Hot night wind stalked through the thorn trees and leleshwa that surrounded the clearing. It bore the odour of swampland, the smell of Lake Victoria, the breath of weeds and sultry plains and tangled bush. It whipped at the oil flares and snatched at the surfaces of the Avian. But there was loneliness in it and aimlessness, as if its passing were only a sterile duty lacking even the beneficent promise of rain.

In the season of drought they are as dry and tawny as the coats of the lion that prowl them, and during the rains they provide the benison of soft grass to all the animals in a child’s picture book.

They are endless and they are empty, but they are as warm with life as the waters of a tropic sea. They are webbed with the paths of eland and wildebeest and Thompson’s gazelle and their hollows and valleys are trampled by thousands of zebra. I have seen a herd of buffalo invade the pastures under the occasional thorn tree groves and, now and then, the whimsically fashioned figure of a plodding rhino has moved along the horizon like a grey boulder come to life and adventure bound.

It was not like a herd of cattle or of sheep, because it was wild, and it carried with it the stamp of wilderness and the freedom of a land still more a possession of Nature than of men. To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told — that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

wildebeest flaunting their brittle horns, or flinging themselves on the ground with the abandon of mad dervishes. I do not know why they do this, but whether it is a faulty sense of balance or merely a shameless recourse to the melodramatic, the wildebeest, if frightened by a plane, will always react in the manner of the circus clown in his frantic attempts to escape the trained spotted dog around and around the sawdust arena. With apology to clowns, if there are any left, I think the antics of the wildebeest, because they are less studied, are more amusing. This may be due to the fact that the wildebeest has two more legs to trip over — at least when he seems to need them most, they serve him least. When he wants to turn, he pirouettes, and when he wants to run, his progress is continually interrupted by a series of Keystone Comedy nose dives. How he gets from place to place with any dispatch would seem a mystery, but actually he does quite well when all is silent overhead — and there is no audience to watch him.

like the eccentric genius who, after being asked by his host why he had rubbed the broccoli in his hair at dinner, apologized with a bow from the waist and said he had thought it was spinach.

There is no twilight in East Africa. Night tramps on the heels of Day with little gallantry and takes the place she lately held, in severe and humourless silence.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay.

The silence that belonged to the slender little craft was, I thought, filled with malice — a silence holding the spirit of wanton mischief, like the quiet smile of a vain woman exultant over a petty and vicious triumph.

In the dead light the Klemm had lost her brilliance and was only the sad and discredited figure of an aerial Jezebel.

I have sometimes thought since of the Elkingtons’ tea-table — round, capacious, and white, standing with sturdy legs against the green vines of the garden, a thousand miles of Africa receding from its edge.

Paddy raised himself then, emitting a little sigh, and began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

I remained conscious, but I closed my eyes and tried not to be. It was not so much the pain as it was the sound. The sound of Paddy’s roar in my ears will only be duplicated, I think, when the doors of hell slip their wobbly hinges, one day, and give voice and authenticity to the whole panorama of Dante’s poetic nightmares. It was an immense roar that encompassed the world and dissolved me into it.

and of advising your father, who had gone to observe some of Bwana Elkington’s horses, that you had been moderately eaten by the large lion.

THE FARM AT NJORO was endless, but it was no farm at all until my father made it. He made it out of nothing and out of everything — the things of which all farms are made. He made it out of forest and bush rocks, new earth, sun, and torrents of warm rain. He made it out of labour and out of patience.

He was no farmer. He bought the land because it was cheap and fertile, and because East Africa was new and you could feel the future of it under your feet.

The forest had fallen back, giving ground with the grim dignity of a respected enemy, and fields were cleaned of the rocks and bush that had lent them the character of wilderness for centuries. Huts had become houses, sheds had become stables, cattle had cut paths in the prairie.

My father bought two old steam engines and anchored them to make power for a grist mill. It was as if there had never before been a grist mill anywhere, as if all the maize in the world waited to be ground and all the wheat ever grown needed only to be made into flour. You could stand on a hill and look down on the dirt-track road that went to Kampi ya Moto, where the maize was so tall that the tallest man seemed like a child when he walked in it, and you could see a ribbon of wagons, each drawn by sixteen oxen, coming loaded with grain to the farm. Sometimes the wagons followed so close upon one another that the ribbon seemed motionless. But at the entrance to the mill, you could see that it almost never stopped. The mill never stopped, and the crew of Kavirondo who unloaded the heavy bags and reloaded them again, the coarse grain ground smooth and yellow, moved from dawn until dark, and sometimes after dark, like the lesser members of a great ballet set to the music of steam and turning millstones. Nearly all the produce of the mill, the flour, and the posho, went to the Government to feed the labourers of the Uganda Railway.

With the money my father made out of the posho and flour, he bought two more old railway engines, fitted them with pulleys, and started the first important sawmill in British East Africa. In time settlers who had lived in mud and daub huts built cedar houses and slabwood barns with shingled roofs, and the horizon took new shape and new colour. Thousands of cords of wood went from our farm into the fire boxes of the arrogant little engines of the Uganda Railway, and on dark nights the immense piles of sawdust slowly burning by the mill were like mountains with volcanic summits,

Our stables grew from a few stalls to long rows of loose-boxes, and our Thoroughbred horses grew from two to a dozen, and then to a hundred, until my father had recovered his old love again, which had always been horses, and I gained my first love which has never left me.

but the one who stayed the longest and leapt the highest was the hero of the night, and his crown was forged from the smiles of the girls.

He comes — rather, he appears; he is a visitation in ebony.

I have my hands at last on the tiny legs, on the bag encasing them. It is a strong bag, transparent and sleek. Through it I see the diminutive hooves, pointed, soft as the flesh of sprouted seeds — impotent hooves, insolent in their urgency to tread the tough earth.

Gently, gently, but strong and steady, I coax the new life into the glow of the stable lamp, and the mare strains with all she has. I renew my grip, hand over hand, waiting for her muscles to surge with my pull. The nose — the head, the whole head — at last the foal itself, slips into my arms, and the silence that follows is sharp as the crack of a Dutchman’s whip — and as short.

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep — leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.

One day, a string of freight cars left the mill siding behind a triumphant little engine. The last of the flour had been milled; all the contracts had been honoured from the first word to the last solemn scratch of ink. The engine made the farthest turn. It hooted once, cast a smudge on the immaculate horizon, and disappeared. It carried with it most of my youth — my father’s title to the farm, the buildings, the stables, and all the horses, except just one — the one with wings.

The path is steep and never straight, but the clean, firm legs of Pegasus measure it with easy contempt. If his wings are fantasy, his worth is not. He never trudges, he never jolts; he is as smooth as silence.

It gives a joyless light; it is a dissolute eye. Watching it burn I am at last depressed. I make it a symbol of despair,

How can the course of a life be changed by a word spoken on a dusty road — a pin-scratch of a road, itself short-lived and feeble against the mountain-calloused crust of Africa?

If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.

He had been lavish with a stranger. He had left me a word, tossed me a key to a door I never knew was there, and had still to find. ‘All the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours …’ A word grows to a thought — a thought to an idea — an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveller loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.

Around this samovar, over those crystal goblets or beside that skin of wine, not much is said that, morning after, will stir a sleepy world to thoughtfulness. What music there was is vanished with the vanished hours, what words were uttered are dead with the fallen dust and are as prudently whisked away.

‘Days of toil and nights of gladness!’

The shores of its lake are rich in silence, lonely with it, but the monotonous flats of sand and mud that circle the shallow water are relieved of dullness, not by only an occasional bird or a flock of birds or by a hundred birds; as long as the day lasts Nakuru is no lake at all, but a crucible of pink and crimson fire — each of its flames, its million flames, struck from the wings of a flamingo. Ten thousand birds of such exorbitant hue, caught in the scope of an eye, is a sight that loses credence in one’s own mind years afterward. But ten thousand flamingos on Lake Nakuru would be a number startling in its insignificance, and a hundred thousand would barely begin the count. Menegai Crater overlooks the township and the lake. In the time of man it has breathed no brimstone, and barely a wisp of smoke. But in the annals of the Rift Valley which contains all this as a sea contains a coral atoll or a desert a dune, the time of man is too brief a period to deserve more than incidental recording. Tomorrow, next day, or next year, Menegai may become again the brazier over which some passing Deity will, for a casual aeon or so, warm his omnipotent hands. But until then, one can stand safely on its edge, watching the lake of pink and scarlet wings, so far below — the lake that seems to have stolen for the moment, at least, all the mountain’s fire.

THE DOORYARD OF NAIROBI falls into the Athi Plains. One night I stood there and watched an aeroplane invade the stronghold of the stars. It flew high; it blotted some of them out; it trembled their flames like a hand swept over a company of candles.

Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine.

I suspect at times that he is one of the wisest men I have ever known — so wise that, realizing the scarcity of wisdom, he has never cast a scrap of it away, though I still remember a remark he made to an overzealous newcomer to his profession: ‘White men pay for danger — we poor ones cannot afford it. Find your elephant, then vanish, so that you may live to find another.’

It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. The problem of classification alone must continue to be very discouraging.

I remembered an old Swahili phrase, and I said it: ‘A wise man is not more than a woman — unless he is also brave.’

You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation’s hour had left it.

A jackal skirts the red pool of comfort that warms you, a tent flap chatters in the wind.

It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.

looking at the fading stars that are caught in the triangle of my open tent. It is always misty when Ruta and I remove the canvas covers from the engine, the propeller, and the cockpit. Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth.

why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost soul seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer.

Blix stands up and yawns and stretches so that the shadows of his arms before the firelight embrace all of the Africa our eyes can see.