West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just ‘home.’ It is all these things but one thing — it is never dull.

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

She was a little like the eccentric genius who, after being asked by his host why he had rubbed the broccoli in his hair at dinner, apologized with a bow from the waist and said he had thought it was spinach.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing.

A lion will fight for what he has and for what he needs; he is contemptuous of cowards and wary of his equals. But he is not afraid. You can always trust a lion to

whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy.’

know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains — the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home, and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence. Even his weapons are plebeian — curved tusks, sharp, deadly, but not beautiful, used inelegantly for rooting as well as for fighting.

The questions are the same, but the symbols are different.

She did not move, and he did not. For a moment he ruffled her hair with his soft muzzle. And then he lifted his head as high as he had ever held it and stood, with the girl at his feet, all through the storm.

He took chances on horses and on Africa; he never regretted the losses, nor boasted about the wins.

Who doesn’t look upward when searching for a name?

Looking upward, what is there but the sky to see? And seeing it, how can the name or the hope be earthbound?

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.

had always believed that the important, the exciting changes in one’s life took place at some crossroad of the world where people met and built high buildings and traded the things they made and laughed and laboured and clung to their whirling civilization like beads on the skirts of a dervish. Everybody was breathless in the world I imagined; everybody moved to hurried music that I never expected to hear.

In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favours that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned.

In any country almost empty of men, ‘love thy neighbour’ is less a pious injunction than a rule for survival. If you meet one in trouble, you stop — another time he may stop for you.

‘When you fly,’ the young man said, ‘you get a feeling of possession that you couldn’t have if you owned all of Africa. You feel that everything you see belongs to you — all the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours; not that you want it, but because, when you’re alone in a plane, there’s no one to share it. It’s there and it’s yours. It makes you feel bigger than you are — closer to being something you’ve sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to seriously imagine.

a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.

‘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.

He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment.

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

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.

I suspect at times that he is one of the wisest men I have ever known — so wise that, realizing the scarcity of wisdom, he has never cast a scrap of it away,

White men pay for danger — we poor ones cannot afford it.

But on that morning you could see nothing; mountain mist had stolen down from Kenya during the night and captured the country.

They are here, all are here, unseen and scattered, but sharing with us a single loneliness.

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.

Like the smile of a badly controlled puppet, hers was overdone, and after she had disappeared and the pad of her slippers was swallowed somewhere in the corridors of the dark house, the fixed, fragile grin still hung in front of my eyes — detached and almost tangible. It floated in the room; it had the same sad quality as the painted trinkets children win at circus booths and cherish until they are broken. I felt that the grin of the brothel keeper would shatter if it were touched and fall to the floor in pieces.

while you remember that unforgettable valley, the valley no longer remembers you.

Flight is but momentary escape from the eternal custody of earth.