West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

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. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

He said: ‘Beryl, I hated to do it, but I had to wake you. The head rolled eight feet from the body.’ There are various techniques for coping with people who say things like that. Possibly the most effective is to catch them just under the ear with a bronze book-end (preferably a cast of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’) and then scream — remembering always that the scream is of secondary importance to the book-end.

‘Variation West — magnetic best. Variation East — magnetic least.’ A silly rhyme, but it served to placate, for the moment, two warring poles — the magnetic and the true.