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‘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.
by any name each is a sanctuary, a temple for talk, and for the observance of the warming rites of comradeship. 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.
Muthaiga Club may nowadays be changed. ‘Na Kupa Hati M’zuri’ (I Bring You Good Fortune) was, in my time, engraved in the stone of its great fireplace. Its broad lounge, its bar, its dining-room — none so elaborately furnished as to make a rough-handed hunter pause at its door, nor yet so dowdy as to make a diamond pendant swing ill at ease — were rooms in which the people who made the Africa I knew danced and talked and laughed, hour after hour.
have wondered sometimes if it is the beauty of a running-horse that brings so many people of so many kinds to such a makeshift amphitheatre as
this is, or if it is the magnetism of a crowd, or if it is only the banal hope of making an easy shilling? Perhaps it is none of these. Perhaps it is the unrecognized expectation of holding for an instant what primordial sensations can be born again in the free strength of flashing flanks and driving hooves beating a challenge against the ground.
Yet I wonder if he is ever bought? I wonder if the spirit of Camciscan, the sturdy integrity of Pegasus, the wise and courageous heart of Wise Child can ever be bought? Is this too much to say of horses?
Has Wrack been over trained since he left me? Has someone been too anxious? Or am I smothering reason with a wish …
— at the elbow of the colt’s new trainer. We nod to each other all around, with about the same warmth one might expect of so many robots. I can’t help it. I’ll be doubly damned if I will try to help it.
‘Be calm,’ says Eric, ‘you’re trembling.’ So I am. Not quite like a leaf, but anyway like a branch. I don’t see how I can help it much, but I turn to Eric and smile vacuously as if somebody just past eighty had asked me to dance.
How can I compare a race like this to music? Or how can I not? Will some perfectionist snug in the arms of his chair under the marble eyes of Beethoven shudder at the thought? I suppose so, but if there’s a fledgling juggler of notes and cadences, less loyal to the stolid past, who seeks a new theme for at least a rhapsody, he may buy a ticket at any gate and see how they run. He will do what I cannot. He will transpose and change and re-create the sound of hooves that pelt like rain, or come like a rolling storm, or taper like the rataplan of fading tympani. He will find instruments to fit
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A race is not a simple thing. This one is not. There are not just ten horses down there, galloping as fast as they can. Skill and reason and chance run with them. Courage runs with them — and strategy. You do not watch a race; you read it. There is cause in every flux and change — jockeys have ability or they haven’t; they bungle or they don’t. A horse has a heart or he lacks it. Questions must be answered before the rap of one hoof follows another — when to hold back, when to coax, when to manoeuvre. More speed? All right, but will he last? Who can tell? A good boy — a sound judge of speed
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But it doesn’t — not Wrack’s heart! His head is up a little and I know he’s giving all he has, but he gives more. He’s a stallion, and the male ego kindles a courage that smothers the pain of his burning muscles. He forgets himself, his jockey, everything but his goal. He lowers his head and thunders after the filly.
My glasses dangle on their strap. I bend over the edge of the box, clamping my fingers on the wooden ledge. I can’t shout, or think. I know this is only a horse-race. I know that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday, whoever loses. I know the world won’t turn a hair, whoever wins — but it seems so hard to believe.
see Wise Child falter once more, and then straighten. I see her transformed from the shadow she was to a small, swift flame of valour that throws my doubt in my teeth. I see her scorn the threat of Wrack and cram the cheers for his supporters back in their throats. I see her sweep the final furlong on swollen legs, forging ahead, feeding him the dust of her hooves.
‘She didn’t just win,’ Eric says; ‘she broke the Leger record.’
Something about that irreverent contrivance of
fabric and wires and noise, blustering through the chaste arena of the night, had stirred the course of my thoughts to restless eddies.
Same old thing — somebody proving how fatal it is to be a fool. Lion, rifles — and stupidity. You can imagine the rest.’
The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent. Into this horizon Tom Black had flown his aeroplane. One day it would carry mail, as he intended it to do. It would soar above old paths tamped by the feet of Native runners; it would cleave wakes in the wind.
It was a small, a stupid, but a callous
crime.
If there were vultures — those false but democratic mourners at every casual bier — they were not mentioned in his recounting.
Just remember never to fly without a match or a biscuit tin. And of course you’re going to fly. I’ve always known it. I could see it in the stars.’
Tom Black had never taught another soul to fly, and the things he had to teach beyond the simple mechanics that go with flying are those things that have not lent themselves to words. Intuition and instinct are mysteries still, though precisely spelled or rolled precisely off the tongue. Tom had these — or whatever qualities they signify.
After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone — each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and copper discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak — it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.
And the days of the clipper ships will be recalled again — and people will wonder if clipper means ancients of the sea or ancients of the air. ‘Trust this,’ said Tom, ‘but nothing else.’ He meant the compass. ‘Instruments can go wrong,’ he said. ‘If you can’t fly without looking at your airspeed and your altimeter and your bank-and-turn indicator — well, then you can’t fly.
He had what those thick books with dull gray covers call ‘sensory reaction.’
‘Now you know what down-draft is,’ said Tom. ‘You get it near mountains, and in Africa it’s common as rain. I could have warned you — but you shouldn’t be robbed of your right to make mistakes.’
had nearly a thousand flying hours to my credit at the time and, if my eyesight had failed me during my preparations for the examinations, it would have been due to the additional hundred or two hours I spent studying navigation out of books whose authors must have been struck dumb in the presence of a one-syllable word. Everything those authors said was sound and sane
and reasonable, but they went on the theory that truth is rarer than radium and that if it became easily available, the market for it would be glutted, holders of stock in it would become destitute, and gems of eternal verity would be given away as premiums.
He never wiped a plane — he groomed it; and what he couldn’t accomplish easily with his hands, he attempted with soft words.
remember Arab Ruta on these occasions — serving the drinks, or the dinner, understanding very little English, but hovering still about the table, not like a servant, or even like a friend, but like an animate household god, quite as bronze, quite as omniscient, and quite as profound.
but each was nevertheless sensitive and had an awareness of things to come whenever those things were to affect them closely.
Denys has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.
he could despair of men, but find poetry in a field of rock.
As for charm, I suspect Denys invented it, but the meaning of it was a bit different — even in his recent day. It was a charm of intellect and strength, of quick intuition and Voltarian humour. He would have greeted doomsday with a wink — and I think he did.
What came from him, if emanate is not the better word, was a force that bore inspiration, spread confidence in the dignity of life, and even gave sometimes a presence to silence.
hardly more than a word under a tin roof. It lies
Archie Watkins, high priest of engine magicians, a big, blond man with a stutter and an almost holy reverence for the hymn of purring pistons, grinned good morning through a thicket of wires and bolts. It was a flyer’s day.
Denys was a keystone in an arch whose other stones were other lives. If a keystone trembles, the arch will carry the warning along its entire curve, then, if the keystone is crushed, the arch will fall, leaving its lesser stones heaped close together, though for a while without design. Denys’ death left some lives without design, but they were rebuilt again, as lives and stones are, into other patterns.
route, but each time I had returned like the needle on my own compass returning to its magnetic meridian. There was no opiate for nostalgia, or at least no lasting cure, and my Avian — my little VP-KAN — shared with me the homing sense.
Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead. It had followed the constant pattern of discard and growth that all lives follow. Things had passed, new things had come.
‘Sturdy fellow, honest fellow, thrifty fellow!’ I would not wish, even upon a misguided entomologist, no matter what his extra-academic sins might be, a single night in company with Siafu ants.
dropped to earth by an intrigued Satan, to mark a theatre for later labours.
Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves — Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets — and
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On the basis of their reaction to my second intrusion, I judged that their thoughts had run somewhat like this: A: The thing that flew over us was no bird, since no bird would have to work so hard to stay in the air — and, anyway, we know all the birds. B: If it was no bird, it was very likely just another trick of those two-legged dwarfs against whom there ought to be a law. C: The two-legged dwarfs (both black and white) have, as long as our long memories go back, killed our bulls for their tusks.
The aristocratically descended visage of the Baron von Blixen Finecke greeted me (as it always did) with the most delightful of smiles caught, like a strip of sunlight, on a familiar patch of leather — well-kept leather, free of wrinkles, but brown and saddle-tough.
Beyond this concession to the fictional idea of what a White Hunter ought to look like, Blix’s face yields not a whit. He has gay, light blue eyes rather than sombre, steel-grey ones; his cheeks are well rounded rather than flat as an axe; his lips are full and generous and not pinched tight in grim realization of what the Wilderness Can Do. He talks. He is never significantly silent.
so angular as to give the impression of being constructed entirely of barrel staves.
have seen the Lady from the Skies.’
