West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

Everything has been done — every material thing — to give this place the aspect of benignity, of friendship, of tolerance and conviviality, but the character of a dwelling, like that of a man, grows slowly. The walls of my house are without memories, or secrets, or laughter. Not enough of life has been breathed into them — their warmth is artificial; too few hands have turned the window latches, too few feet have trod the thresholds. The boards of the floor, self-conscious as youth or falsely proud as the newly rich, have not yet unlimbered enough to utter a single cordial creak. In time they will, but not for me.

My father leans against the mantelpiece and begins to load his pipe with tobacco whose aroma bestows a presence on thirty vanished years. That aroma and the smell of the smoke that follows it are to me the quintessence of memory. But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will, and my father knows it. He is sixty-four years old now, and well deserving of deep chairs and care and dottle dreams and carping cronies — should he desire these. He might say, with ample reason: ‘I’m old now. I’ve earned my rest.’ But he doesn’t. He says: ‘You know, I like South Africa. I like Durban. I’m going down there to start training. The racing’s good and the stakes are high. I think it’s a good chance.’ He announces his intention with the sanguine expectancy of a schoolboy.

We talk of Pegasus — and of how he had died, quietly one night in his stall, for no reason that anyone could ever find. ‘Snake, perhaps,’ says my father. ‘Yellow mambas are deadly.’ It may have been a mamba, or it may not have been. However, or whatever it was, Pegasus — so expectantly christened so long ago — is gone now, yielding his ethereal wings to the realization of wood and steel ones that fly as high and higher, but, for all that, are never so buoyant or capable of bearing quite such cargoes of hope.

A MAP IN THE hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man’s faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust.

A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’

Yet, looking at it, feeling it, running a finger along its lines, it is a cold thing, a map, humourless and dull, born of calipers and a draughtsman’s board. That coastline there, that ragged scrawl of scarlet ink, shows neither sand nor sea nor rock; it speaks of no mariner, blundering full sail in wakeless seas, to bequeath, on sheepskin or a slab of wood, a priceless scribble to posterity. This brown blot that marks a mountain has, for the casual eye, no other significance, though twenty men, or ten, or only one, may have squandered life to climb it. Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert; and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet. Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope or sagas of conquest. No map I have flown by has ever been lost or thrown away; I have a trunk containing continents. I have the maps I always used en route to England and back. I have the log of my flight with Blix.

Fog had spilled out of the sky by night and the morning found Nairobi and the Athi Plains bundled in mist.

The town, the sunrise, and the ship were isolated each from the other by clouds that had no edges and refused to roll. They lay on the earth like sadness come to rest;

Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.

Abdullah Ali was in charge of the customs office at Alamza, the Cairo airport. He was also in charge of a small department in the Realm of Things to Come; he told fortunes, and told them well. He loved aviators with a paternal love and, in his way, he gave them guidance that put to shame even their compasses.

his slender hands moved against the sand like foraging sparrows against snow.

Night falls like a dropped shutter in Libya in March.

THE GREEKS OF CYRENAICA called it Hesperides. Ptolemy the Third was in love with his wife, so he called it Berenice. I don’t know who changed it to Benghazi, but this is not the first act of vandalism the old city has suffered. The cornerstones of Benghazi are the tombs of its founders and their conquerors, and much of its history lies still buried in hand-hewn crypts of rock.