West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless.

cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires — rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.

wholly possessed her yet. In time she will be taken, yielding neither to Nazi nor to Fascist conquest,

but to integrity equal to her own and to wisdom capable of understanding her wisdom and of discerning between wealth and fulfilment. Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice. Barbarism, however bright its trappings, is still alien to her heart.

She was like a scrap of trash caught in a gale, and I experienced that sense of futility all pilots must sometimes feel when the natural forces that rule this planet reassert their sovereignty (and express their contempt) for Man the Pretender.

Blix would see it again and so should I one day. And still it was gone. Seeing it again could not be living it again. You can always rediscover an old path and wander over it, but the best you can do then is to say, ‘Ah, yes, I know this turning!’ — or remind yourself that, while you remember that unforgettable valley, the valley no longer remembers you.

The Gull had a turquoise-blue body and silver wings. Edgar Percival had made her with care, with skill, and with worry — the care of a veteran flyer, the skill of a master designer, and the worry of a friend.

now one of England’s great pilots, had traded his dreams and had got in return a better thing. Tom had grown older too; he had

jettisoned a deadweight of irrelevant hopes and wonders, and had left himself a realistic code that had no room for temporizing or easy sentiment.

‘Anyway, it ought to amuse you to think that your financial backer lives

on a farm called “Place of Death” and your plane is being built at “Gravesend.” If you were consistent, you’d christen the Gull “The Flying Tombstone.”’

Time stopped — and Distance too. It was the moment I lifted the blue-and-silver Gull from the aerodrome, the moment the photographers aimed their cameras, the moment I felt the craft refuse its burden and strain toward the earth in sullen rebellion, only to listen at last to the persuasion of stick and elevators, the dogmatic argument of blueprints that said she had to fly because the figures proved it.

and the question had frightened me.

The fear is gone now — not overcome nor reasoned away. It is gone because something else has taken its place; the confidence and the trust, the inherent belief in the security of land underfoot — now this faith is transferred to my plane, because the land has vanished and there is no other tangible thing to fix faith upon. Flight is but momentary escape from the eternal custody of earth.

I suppose that the denial of natural impulse is what is meant by ‘keeping calm,’ but impulse has reason in

the water — seems a terrifying abandonment, not only of reason, but of sanity. Your mind and your heart reject it. It is your hands — your stranger’s hands — that follow with unfeeling precision the letter of the law.

will have cheated laws that the cunning of science has taught him how to cheat, and he will feel his guilt and be eager for the sanctuary of the soil.

There are words for everything. There was a word for this — airlock, I thought.

LIKE ALL OCEANS, THE Indian Ocean seems never to end, and the ships that sail on it are small and slow. They have no speed, nor any sense of urgency; they do not cross the water,

they live on it until the land comes home.

The Gull too was dead. I had been unable to buy her after my flight, and so J. C. had shipped her to Seramai and sold her to a wealthy Indian who might have understood many things, but not the beauty, nor the needs, of a plane. He left her exposed to the weather on the airport at Dar es Salaam until her engine rusted and her wings peeled and she was forgotten by everyone, I think, except myself. Perhaps, by now, some official with an eye for immaculacy, has had her skeleton dragged to the sea and buried in it, but the sea will take small pride in that. The Gull had not failed me. When she was checked, after my flight, it was learned that somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland ice had lodged in the air intake of the last petrol tank, partially choking fuel flow to the carburetor. I had wondered since how, so handicapped, the Gull had

for me to believe, I had my logbooks and my pound of scraps and papers to prove it to myself — memory in ink. It was only needed that someone should say, ‘You ought to write about it, you know. You really ought!’