West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE to bring order out of memory?

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?

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.

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.

A telegraph line followed the rails to Kisumu about 1902 — or it was intended that one should. The posts were there, and the wire too, but rhino take sensual and sadistic pleasure in scratching their great hulks against telegraph posts, and any baboon worthy of his salt cannot resist swinging from suspended wires. Often a herd of giraffe found it expedient to cross the railroad tracks, but would not condescend to bow to the elevated metal strands that proclaimed the White Man’s mandate over their feeding grounds. As a result, many telegrams en route from Mombasa to Kisumu, or the other way around, were intercepted, their cryptic dots and dashes frozen in a festoon of golden wire dangling from one or another of the longest necks in Africa.

No animal, however fast, has greater speed than a charging lion over a distance of a few yards. It is a speed faster than thought — faster always than escape.

I 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. He stands higher than a domestic pig when he is full grown, and his hide is dust-coloured and tough and clothed in bristles. 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.

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.

Jockey: Sonny Bumpus. What’s in a name? At least there’s no weight in this one. There’s an airy insolence in it. Who would be so heedless as to run a horse against such a happily cocksure combination as — Sonny Bumpus on Wise Child?

I have wondered sometimes if it is the beauty of a running-horse that brings so many people of so many kinds to such a makeshift amphitheatre as this is, or if it is the magnetism of a crowd, or if it is only the banal hope of making an easy shilling? Perhaps it is none of these. Perhaps it is the unrecognized expectation of holding for an instant what primordial sensations can be born again in the free strength of flashing flanks and driving hooves beating a challenge against the ground.

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

But you cannot discredit truth merely because legend has grown out of it. The sometimes almost godlike achievements of our own species in ages past toddle through history supported more often than not on the twin crutches of fable and human credulity.

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

I still remember a remark he made to an overzealous newcomer to his profession: ‘White men pay for danger — we poor ones cannot afford it. Find your elephant, then vanish, so that you may live to find another.’

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.

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

The Italian idea was based upon the wistful suspicion that no foreigner (certainly no Englishman) could fly over Libya, for instance, and successfully resist the temptation to take candid camera shots of the newly contrived Fascist forts. The Italians, under Mussolini, would have been hurt indeed to know that a pilot existed (and many of them did) who had less curiosity about the Fascist forts than about the exact location of a bar of soap and a tub of hot water. The official reasoning seemed to run about like this: ‘An aviator who shows an interest in our fortresses is guilty of espionage, and one who does not is guilty of disrespect.’ I think the latter crime was, of the two, the more repugnant to the legionnaires of the flowing tunic and the gleaming button.

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