West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

So there are many Africas. There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa — and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else’s, but likely to be haughtily disagreed with by all those who believe in some other Africa.

When I asked him, in Swahili, to explain the joke, he looked profoundly hurt. There wasn’t any joke, he said. It was just that the plane was so smooth and her wings so strong that it made him want to laugh!

Wherever you are, it seems, you must have news of some other place, some bigger place, so that a man on his deathbed in the swamplands of Victoria Nyanza is more interested in what has lately happened in this life than in what may happen in the next. It is really this that makes death so hard — curiosity unsatisfied.

‘People forget,’ he added. ‘It’s easy for a whole group of people to forget just one, but if you’re very long in a place like this you remember everybody you ever met. You even worry about people you never liked; you get nostalgic about your enemies. It’s all something to think about and it all helps.’

But then, since men still live by the sword, it is a little optimistic to expect the lion to withdraw his claws, handicapped as he is by his inability to read our better effusions about the immorality of bloodshed.

the tyranny of clocks.

Balmy had seen zebra before and zebra had often seen Balmy, but I had never observed that any gestures of mutual respect had been made by either side. I think Balmy was aware of the dictum, noblesse oblige, but, for all her mud-rolling, she never got very close to a zebra or even oxen without distending her nostrils in the manner of an eighteenth-century grande dame forced to wade through the fringes of a Paris mob. As for the zebra, they replied in kind, moving out of her path with the ponderous dignity of righteous proletariat, fortified in their contempt by the weight of their number. The old dam we interrupted at her feeding on the Green Hill swept Balmy with a cold glance, kicked up her heels, and trotted toward the centre of the herd flinging over her shoulder at her spindly-legged foal a command to follow. But the foal never moved. I once saw a London street urchin stand enraptured almost to the point of tears at the sight of a lovely lady swathed in sables stepping from her car to the curb. There was the same pathos and the same wistfulness in the eyes of the zebra foal as it hesitated chest deep in the long grass and stared upward at the Thoroughbred filly. It was altogether a pretty picture even as observed from the saddle on Balmy’s back, but I had left the farm with the specific warning to keep her calm at any cost. A race-horse, trained to the edge, can undo weeks of patient work merely by having a nervous tantrum at the wrong time. Balmy was trained to the ed...

I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.

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.

‘Lions are more intelligent than some men,’ he said, ‘and more courageous than most. 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 be exactly what he is — and never anything else.’

‘A domesticated lion is only an unnatural lion — and whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy.’

Why I ran at all or with what purpose in mind is beyond my answering, but when I had no specific destination I always ran as fast as I could in the hope of finding one — and I always found it.

He fought anything that needed to be fought, and when there was nothing immediately available in his category, he killed cats.

Courage lives in a man’s stomach, but there are times when it is not at home — and then the stomach is sour!’

‘Talk lives in a man’s head,’ he answered, ‘but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of some men there is nothing to keep it company — and so talk goes out through the lips.’

Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy.

No English word is so smooth that the tongue trained to Swahili cannot make it smoother.

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.

There were men who thought my father a little mad. Contracts had been evaded before, hadn’t they? Wasn’t God responsible for drought? Yes, and for a number of other things, my father thought, including lack of drought. But he held that God was reasonably innocent in the matter of a signed contract.

work and hope. But never hope more than you work.’

Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it. I sit in a labyrinth of solitude jabbing at its bulwarks with the point of a pen — jabbing, jabbing.

We laughed at some things because we had grown so much older; we were serious about others because we were still so young.

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

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.

‘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.

They were blue and they seemed to dissolve all questions and all answers within themselves. And they laughed when they should have been solemn. They were eyes that might have followed the trajectory of a dead cat through a chapel window with more amusement than horror, but might at the same time have expressed sympathy for the fate of the cat.

if my eyesight had failed me during my preparations for the examinations, it would have been due to the additional hundred or two hours I spent studying navigation out of books whose authors must have been

Everything those authors said was sound and sane and reasonable, but they went on the theory that truth is rarer than radium and that if it became easily available, the market for it would be glutted, holders of stock in it would become destitute, and gems of eternal verity would be given away as premiums.

Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead. It had followed the constant pattern of discard and growth that all lives follow. Things had passed, new things had come.

Kilamakoy (which is not a settlement, but a Wakamba word for a stretch of country without residential possibilities),

Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets — and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.

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

Although Doctor Turvy’s prescriptions indicated that he put his trust in a wine list rather than a pharmacopoeia, he had two qualities of special excellence in a physician; his diagnosis was always arrived at in a split second — and he held the complete confidence of his patient. Beyond that, his adeptness at mental telepathy (in which Blix himself was pretty well grounded) eliminated the expensive practice of calling round to feel the pulse or take a temperature. Nobody ever saw Doctor Turvy — and that fact, Blix insisted, was bedside manner carried to its final degree of perfection.

It doesn’t make a hunter out of you to turn over on your canvas cot and realize that the thing you are hunting at such expense and physical tribulation is so contemptuous of your prowess as to be eating leaves right in front of your eyes.

It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. The problem of classification alone must continue to be very discouraging.

I had never realized before how quickly men deteriorate without razors and clean shirts. They are like potted plants that go to weed unless they are pruned and tended daily. A single day’s growth of beard makes a man look careless; two days’, derelict; and four days’, polluted.

A life has to move or it stagnates.

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.

I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in. These things I still have, I remind myself — and shall have until I leave them.

It seems wonderful, but not strange to me. There are men whose failures surprise nobody, and others whose successes are as easily anticipated

When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there.

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.

At some bar — I cannot remember which, any more than Blix or Alcock could if they were asked — there began an historic session of comradely tippling and verbose good-fellowship which dissolved Time and reduced Space to an anteroom. On the table between those good companions the whole of history was dissected and its mouldy carcass borne away in an empty ice bucket. International problems were solved in a word, and the direction of Fate foreseen through the crystal windows of two upturned goblets.

In the family of continents, 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.

We fly, but we have not ‘conquered’ the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick falls across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness.

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

the plane I stepped from was not the Gull, and for days while I was in New York I kept thinking about that and wishing over and over again that it had been the Gull, until the wish lost its significance, and time moved on, overcoming many things it met on the way.