West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

something new, something better, perhaps. A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. 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. Still, I look at my yesterdays for months past, and find them as good a lot of yesterdays as anybody might want. I sit there in the firelight and see them all.

Everything has been done — every material thing — to give this place the aspect of benignity, of friendship, of tolerance and conviviality, but the character of a dwelling, like that of a man, grows slowly.

But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will,

The shape of the shadow has changed and will change again because Benghazi sprawls in the path of war. Mars kicks the little city to earth and it rises again, stubbornly, and is reduced again, but not for long. It is a small city with a soul — a grubby soul, perhaps, but cities with souls seldom die.

Put her in an apron and soak the mask of paint from her face and she could be used as a fit subject for any artist wanting to depict the misery and the despair and the loneliness of all women driven to drudgery. She might have been a seamstress, a farmhand’s wife, a charwoman, a barmaid no longer maiden. She might have been anything — but of all things, why this?

We spent that night in Paris, and on the afternoon of the next day, Tom Black, Blix, and I sat at the Mayfair in London surrounded by all the comforting accessories to civilization — and drank a toast to Africa because we knew that Africa was gone.

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.

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.

We are bound for a place thirty-six hundred miles from here — two thousand miles of it unbroken ocean. Most of the way it will be night. We are flying west with the night.’