West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.

I have never known whether this questionable encouragement to the casual traveller was only the result of well-meant wishful thinking or whether some official cursed with a depraved and sadistic humour had found an outlet for it after years of repression in a muggy Nairobi office.

I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.

that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

well spiced with insult,

How I communicate? :-P

I have always known what I looked like — but at fifteen-odd, I become curious to know what can be done about it. Nothing, I suppose

Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

I sit in a labyrinth of solitude jabbing at its bulwarks with the point of a pen — jabbing, jabbing.

Death will have his moment of respect, however he comes along, and no matter upon what living thing he lays his hand.

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

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.

Voi presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof.

Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead.

The essence of elephant-hunting is discomfort in such lavish proportions that only the wealthy can afford it.

This is true of all sorts of pursuits really...

‘There’s an old adage,’ he said, ‘translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages — “Life is life and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet when the goldfish die.” ’

THE ONLY DISADVANTAGE IN surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it — and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics.

It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.

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.’

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.

To me, desert has the quality of darkness; none of the shapes you see in it are real or permanent. Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless, and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility.

The symbols of war — impressive desert forts, shiny planes, beetle-browed warships — all inspire the sons of Rome, if not to gallantry, then at least to histrionics, which, in the Italian mind, are synonymous anyway.

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.

She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained.

I could say to myself, ‘You needn’t do it, of course,’ knowing at the same time that nothing is so inexorable as a promise to your pride.

No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things — the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold — were false to you.

Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand.

The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all.