West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start; there can be no other.’

Africa is of an ancient age and the blood of many of her peoples is as venerable and as chaste as truth.

What upstart race, sprung from some recent, callow century to arm itself with steel and boastfulness, can match in purity the blood of a single Masai Murani whose heritage may have stemmed not far from Eden?

rumble, colonies may change masters, and in the face of it all Africa lies, and will lie, like a great, wisely somnolent giant unmolested by the noisy drum-rolling of bickering empires. It is not only a land; it is an entity born of one man’s hope and another man’s fancy.

have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure.

Arab Ruta is a Nandi, anthropologically a member of a Nilotic tribe, humanly a member of a smaller tribe, a more elect tribe, the tribe composed of those too few, precisely sensitive, but altogether indomitable individuals contributed sparingly by each race, exclusively by none. He is of the tribe that observes with equal respect the soft voice and the hardened hand, the fullness of a flower, the quick finality of death. His is the laughter of a free man happy at his work, a strong man with lust for living. He is not black. His skin holds the sheen and warmth of used copper. His eyes are dark and wide-spaced, his nose full-boned and capable of arrogance.

With such registration letters as hers, it requires of my friends no great imagination or humour to speak of her always as just ‘the Kan’ — and the Kan she is, even to me. But this is not libel, for such nicknames are born out of love. To me she is alive and to me she speaks. I feel through the soles of my feet on the rudder-bar the willing strain and flex of her muscles. The resonant, guttural voice of her exhausts has a timbre more articulate than wood and steel, more vibrant than wires and sparks and pounding pistons.

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.

I think Balmy was aware of the dictum, noblesse oblige, but, for all her mud-rolling, she never got very close to a zebra or even oxen without distending her nostrils in the manner of an eighteenth-century grande dame forced to wade through the fringes of a Paris mob.

But the foal never moved.

once saw a London street urchin stand enraptured almost to the point of tears at the sight of a lovely lady swathed in sables stepping from her car to the curb. There was the same pathos and the same wistfulness in the eyes of the zebra foal as it hesitated chest deep in the long grass and stared upward at the Thoroughbred filly.

A race-horse, trained to the edge, can undo weeks of patient work merely by having a nervous tantrum at the wrong time.

She had at first ignored the young zebra, but the imperious voice of the old dam at once brought the situation to an issue. There must have been in it not only the call of a mother to its young, but also some cutting reference to Balmy as a pompous, vain creature not fit to be admired by honest folk. At least I am sure that was Balmy’s interpretation.

The details of what followed have never been quite clear in my memory. Balmy’s challenge, clearly well spiced with insult, brought the old dam up on her heels and there ensued a battle of tongues that, in volume of sound and intensity of

fury, would have put to shame all the aroused fishwives of literature. In the midst of it Balmy began to sweat, to tremble, and to buck, the old zebra dam galloped in erratic circles, bawling all the while, and the little foal, torn between filial duty and the fatal fascination of the bay filly, bounded and danced between the two like an hysterical child.

I managed at last to bring her under control and head her toward the farm, but at her heels followed the little zebra foal, still a bit dazed and I think struggling against his own shame, and perhaps even against a minute twinge of remorse.

seems characteristic of the mind of man that the repression of what is natural to humans must be abhorred, but that what is natural to an infinitely

more natural animal must be confined within the bounds of a reason peculiar only to men — more peculiar sometimes than seems reasonable at all.

lived, but its voice was a whisper. It produced, but not with the lusty ease it had before. There was less gusto, but Kibii and I did what children do when there are things abroad too big to understand; we stayed close to each other and played games that made no noise.

Among my galaxy of scars is one which

an ungallant Nandi boy, whom I had bested in a wrestling bout, made with his father’s sword. He waited until he caught me walking alone one day about two miles

from the farm, and then he rushed from behind a thorn tree swinging the weapo...

into the night and the flat, grassy meadow behind the ridge on Equator Ranch was light enough to receive the shadows of moving bodies, the dancers formed in a ring. The heads of the girls were shaved smooth and the heads of the young men were resplendent in long plaits of hair decorated with coloured feathers. The young men wore rattles of metal on their legs, shaped like cowrie shells, and the skins of serval-cats swayed and dangled from their buttocks. They wore the black-and-white tails of Colobus monkeys and made them writhe like snakes when the dance was on.

When the leader was exhausted, there was another to take his place, and after that another, and another, 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.

‘When the world began,’ Kibii said, ‘each animal, even the Chameleon, had a task to do. I learned it from my father and my grandfather, and all our people know this fact.’

wandered alone in the great forest and on the plains, and he worried very much because he could not remember yesterday and so he could not imagine tomorrow. God saw this, so he sent the Chameleon to the first man (who was a Nandi) with a message, saying that there would never be such a thing as death and that tomorrow would be like today, and that

sluggish fellow, and the Egret is a pretty bird. There are doubtless better answers, but somehow, nowadays, I prefer Kibii’s.

A lovely horse is always an experience to him. It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words. He has always talked about horses, but he has never unravelled his love of them in a skein of commonplace adjectives. At

seventy, in competition with the crack trainers of South Africa, his name heads the list of winners in the high-stake racing centre of Durban. In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parent. He came out of Sandhurst with such a ponderous knowledge of Greek and Latin that it would have submerged a lesser man. He might have gone down like a swimmer in the sea struggling with an Alexandrian tablet under each arm, but he never let his education get the better of him. He won what prizes there were translating Ovid and Æschylus, and then took up steeplechasing until he became one of the finest amateur riders in England. He took chances on horses and on Africa; he never regretted the losses, nor boasted about the wins.

It is a morning in November. Some places in the world are grey as a northern sea in November, and colder. Some are silver with ice. But not Njoro. In November, Njoro and all the Highlands await their ration of warm soft rain tendered regularly by one or another of the Native Gods — Kikuyu, Masai, Kavirondo — or by the White Man’s God, or perhaps by all known Gods, working amiably together. November is a month of benison and birth.

Eleven months for a mare. Bred to Referee — small, perfect, gallant as a warrior, smooth as a coin — Coquette is due to foal in a matter of days. I close the book and call for Toombo.

He comes — rather, he appears; he is a visitation in ebony. Nothing in this world of extremes is blacker than Toombo, nothing is rounder than his belly, nothing is broader than his smile.

No matter how many times the name Beryl goes in the Native or Indian ear, it emerges from the lips — Beru. No English word is so smooth that the tongue trained to Swahili cannot make it smoother.

Toombo’s grin spreads over his wide face like a ripple in a pond. To him, birth and success are synonymous; the hatching of a hen’s egg is a triumph, or even the bursting of a seed. Toombo’s own birth is the major success of his life. He grins until there is no more room for both the grin and his eyes, so his eyes disappear. He turns and shuffles through the doorway and I hear his deep voice bawling for Otieno.

it always has. Nothing is more common than birth; a million creatures are born in the time it takes to turn this page, and another million die.

The tall, thin Kavirondo looks into the face of the fat one. Toombo’s face is receptive — it cannot be looked at, it can only be looked into.

single ‘Walihie!’ and he has shot his philosophic bolt.

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.

What does a fall of rain, a single fall of rain, mean in anybody’s life? What does it matter if this month there is none, if the sky is as clear as the song of a boy, and the sun shines and people walk in it and the world is yellow with it? What does a week matter, and who is so dour as to welcome a storm?

Look at a seed in the palm of a farmer’s hand. It can be blown away with a puff of breath and that is the end of it. But it holds three lives — its own, that of the man who may feed on its increase, and that of the man who lives by its culture.

After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work.’

Spartan thread held through my father’s counsel, then as now.

had two saddlebags, and Pegasus. The saddlebags held the pony’s rug, his brush, a blacksmith’s knife, six pounds of crushed oats, and a thermometer as a precaution against Horse Sickness. For me the bags held pajamas, slacks, a shirt, toothbrush, and comb. I never owned less, nor can I be sure that I ever needed more.

For what can be said of a dog? What can be said of Buller — a dog like any other, except only to me? Can one repeat again those self-soothing and pompous phrases: this noble beast? — this paragon of comrades? — this friend of man?

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.

the printed page, a nightly nobody, had discovered first the dramatic power of those haunting tones, those significant syllables,

— Never — Nevermore!

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.