West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

What upstart race, sprung from some recent, callow century to arm itself with steel and boastfulness, can match in purity the blood of a single Masai Murani whose heritage may have stemmed not far from Eden?

Racial purity, true aristocracy, devolve not from edict, nor from rote, but from the preservation of kinship with the elemental forces and purposes of life whose understanding is not farther beyond the mind of a Native shepherd than beyond the cultured rumblings of a mortar-board intelligence.

Africa is mystic; it is wild;

It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one.

Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.

the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant.

Arab Ruta is a Nandi, anthropologically a member of a Nilotic tribe, humanly a member of a smaller tribe, a more elect tribe, the tribe composed of those too few, precisely sensitive, but altogether indomitable individuals contributed sparingly by each race, exclusively by none. He is of the tribe that observes with equal respect the soft voice and the hardened hand, the fullness of a flower, the quick finality of death. His is the laughter of a free man happy at his work, a strong man with lust for living. He is not black. His skin holds the sheen and warmth of used copper. His eyes are dark and wide-spaced, his nose full-boned and capable of arrogance.

It is this combination of physical strength and willingness to work that has made the Kavirondo the most tractable and dependable source of labour in East Africa.

To the charge of other and sterner tribes that he is not only uncircumcised, but that he eats dead meat without much concern about the manner of its killing, he is blandly indifferent.

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!

I couldn’t help wondering what Africa would have been like if such physique as these Kavirondo had were coupled with equal intelligence — or perhaps I should say with cunning equal to that of their white brethren.

My phobia is an unaccountable physical repulsion from persons who are sick rather than from sickness itself.

A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but, if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again,

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told — that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

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.

‘So,’ he scolded, ‘now it has come to this. To walk is not enough. To ride on a horse is not enough. Now people must go from place to place through the air, like a diki toora. Nothing but trouble will come of it, Beru. God spits upon such blasphemy.’ ‘God has spat,’ sighed Woody.

He was a tame lion, Paddy was. He was deaf to the call of the wild.

whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy.’

It was evidence of the double debt England still owes to ancient China for her two gifts that made expansion possible — tea and gunpowder.

Paddy raised himself then, emitting a little sigh, and began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

It seems characteristic of the mind of man that the repression of what is natural to humans must be abhorred, but that what is natural to an infinitely more natural animal must be confined within the bounds of a reason peculiar only to men — more peculiar sometimes than seems reasonable at all.

I still have the sears of his teeth and claws, but they are very small now and almost forgotten, and I cannot begrudge him his moment.

Delamere had two great loves — East Africa and the Masai People. To the country he gave his genius, most of his substance, and all of his energy. To the Masai he gave the help and understanding of a mind unhampered by the smug belief that the white man’s civilization has nothing to learn from the black man’s preferred lack of it. He respected the spirit of the Masai, their traditions, their physical magnificence, and their knowledge of cattle which, excepting war, was their only concern.

Lady Delamere while I was still a child. She was, in a sense, my adopted mother, since I lived alone with my father on the farm at Njoro,

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

I swung into the hop-and-carry-one gait — a kind of bounding lope used by the Nandi and Masai Murani

His face was young and hard, but there was soft humour in it. There was love of life in it — love for the hunt, love for the sureness of his strength, love for the beauty and usefulness of his spear.

Arab Maina’s appearance was transformed. His face had taken on a sullen, arrogant expression, his square, bold jaw jutted forward. His eyes dimmed almost dreamily and sank behind high, shiny cheekbones. I watched the muscles on his neck swell like those on the neck of an angry snake, and saw flecks of white froth appear in the corners of his mouth. Passive and rigid he stared back at the lion.

In less than a minute the dogs, the man, and the warthog had found the horizon and disappeared behind it like four fabulous characters in search of Æsop.

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.

‘Do you want me, Beru — or is it Otieno?’ No matter how many times the name Beryl goes in the Native or Indian ear, it emerges from the lips — Beru. No English word is so smooth that the tongue trained to Swahili cannot make it smoother.

Toombo and Otieno begin their nightly watch. And the time goes slowly. But there are other things. Everything else goes on as it always has. Nothing is more common than birth; a million creatures are born in the time it takes to turn this page, and another million die.

Toombo’s face is receptive — it cannot be looked at, it can only be looked into.

Look at a seed in the palm of a farmer’s hand. It can be blown away with a puff of breath and that is the end of it. But it holds three lives — its own, that of the man who may feed on its increase, and that of the man who lives by its culture. If the seed die, these men will not, but they may not live as they always had. They may be affected because the seed is dead; they may change, they may put their faith in other things.

After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work.’

Kima the baboon, the big baboon that loved my father but hated me; Kima’s grimaces, his threats, his chain in the courtyard; the morning he escaped to trap me against the wall of a hut, digging his teeth into my arm, clawing at my eyes, screaming his jealous hatred until, with childish courage born of terror, I killed him dead, using a knobkerrie and frantic hands and sobbing fury — and ever afterward denied the guilt.

Somehow that word is always to be trusted. ‘Hodi’ — we who have used it know it would scorch the lips of a liar and make a cinder of a thief’s tongue. It is a gentle word, a word of honour, asking an answer gently. And there is an answer. I rise from the chair and look out through the door, seeing no one, and give the answer. ‘Kaaribu!’ I have said, ‘Come —you are welcome.’

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together. No, my friend, I have not learned more than this. Nor in all these years have I met many who have learned as much.

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.

At times he got damned bored with it. But you had to have something to worry about, didn’t you?

He had been lavish with a stranger. He had left me a word, tossed me a key to a door I never knew was there, and had still to find.

Whoever heard of Destiny with pliers in his hand?

But gossip has its better points. Whispers are not restricted to the bearing of bad news and there are men who smell injustice however softly it walks.

The small fleck of sweat on her flanks is the only indication that she shares with us our anxiety, our unmentioned fears, and our quiet hopes.

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.

Still, since men cherish the paradox requiring that to insure immortality they must preserve what is most mortal about them, wood was gathered and a fire was built.

African tragedy — melancholy trivia. What’s in a point of view?

After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone — 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 — it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.

And the days of the clipper ships will be recalled again — and people will wonder if clipper means ancients of the sea or ancients of the air.

Denys has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that 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.