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.

His is the laughter of a free man happy at his work, a strong man with lust for living.

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. She speaks to me now, saying the wind is right, the night is fair, the effort asked of her well within her powers.

two brown eyes that seemed trapped in a spider web of weary lines.

Grey blades of light sliced at the darkness and within a few moments I could see the mining camp in all its bleak and somehow courageous isolation — a handful of thatched huts, a tangle of worn machinery, a storehouse of corrugated iron.

the quick suspicion of the insane

fortified in their contempt by the weight of their number.

he wears his long black hair braided to his long black beard, and together they make a cowl, like a monk’s. His face is small and stern and it peers from the cowl with nimble black eyes.

The forest had fallen back, giving ground with the grim dignity of a respected enemy,

His eyes are small and lightless and capable of but one expression — suspicion. What he does not understand, he suspects, and what he suspects, he fights.

The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening,

The distant roar of a waking lion rolls against the stillness of the night, and we listen. It is the voice of Africa bringing memories that do not exist in our minds or in our hearts — perhaps not even in our blood. It is out of time, but it is there, and it spans a chasm whose other side we cannot see.

I never heard the ruffle of drums in those days or saw many flags dragging precise platoons behind them. I saw men leave their work at the mills, and there were teams of oxen on the farm without their masters. The farm 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.

The days that marked the war went on like the ticking of a clock that had no face and showed no time.

waiting for her foal to make its exit from oblivion.

I 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.

never hope more than you work.’

Pencil-chewing leads to nothing. My scribbles are complete, the price of feed is adamant; it is hard, it can’t be changed by thinking.

It is an ancient lamp, not of my own things. Its base is cheap metal, nicked in places, its chimney is smudged with soot. How has it lighted the hours of how many men? How many men have scribbled under it, eaten under it, got drunk under it? Has it ever seen success? I think not. It is crumpled and slatternly, enured to failure, as if no man with hope in his fingers had ever trimmed its wick. It gives a joyless light; it is a dissolute eye.

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.

much of Kenya’s future was already the past of other places.

performing feeble incantations and attempting sorcery against gangrene with bandage, iodine, and water.

since men cherish the paradox requiring that to insure immortality they must preserve what is most mortal about them,

The wounded man, wrapped in his bandages and his pain,

You’re like somebody who only knows what he thinks after reading his newspaper.

The wonder of my first fledgling hours of flight was lost in the many hundreds of hours I had sat making my living at the controls of my plane.

Makindu doesn’t look like anything; it isn’t anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine.

These are perhaps just stories born of imagination. Ivory was once almost as precious as gold, and wherever there is treasure, men mix it with mystery. But still, there is no mystery about the things you see yourself.

you cannot discredit truth merely because legend has grown out of it.

There were four pockets in his bush shirt, but I don’t think he knew it; he never carried anything unless he was actually hunting — and then it was just a rifle and ammunition. He never went around hung with knives, revolvers, binoculars, or even a watch. He could tell time by the sun, and if there were no sun, he could tell it, anyway. He wore over his closely cropped greying hair a terai hat, colourless and limp as a wilted frond.

a man at his side — so angular as to give the impression of being constructed entirely of barrel staves.

Old Man Wicks, oddly enough, wasn’t very old — he was barely forty — and it may have been that his monkish life was the first choice of whatever other lives he could have led.

the way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.

mountain mist had stolen down from Kenya during the night and captured the country.

A life has to move or it stagnates.

We sit together through the evening and discuss the things that each has saved for the other to hear.

Fog had spilled out of the sky by night and the morning found Nairobi and the Athi Plains bundled in mist. The town, the sunrise, and the ship were isolated each from the other by clouds that had no edges and refused to roll. They lay on the earth like sadness come to rest; they clung to people like burial clothes, white and premature.

What had been a blue sky became a ferment of clouds that clotted before a driving wind and blacked out our vision with curtains of rain.

“I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of destiny. It seems to get up early and then go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it.”