West With the Night

by Beryl Markham

  On the way from Nungwe I flew toward Rothschild’s Camp because the spot was on Woody’s route on his flight from Shinyaga in Western Tanganyika to Nairobi and I knew that, whether alive or dead, he would not be found far off his course.

  He was flying a German Klemm monoplane equipped with a ninety-five horsepower British Pobjoy motor. If this combination had any virtue in such vast and unpredictable country, it was that the extraordinary wingspan of the plane allowed for long gliding range and slow landing speed.

  Swiftness, distance, and the ability to withstand rough weather were, none of them, merits of the Klemm. Neither the plane nor the engine it carried was designed for more than casual flying over well-inhabited, carefully charted country, and its use by East African Airways for both transport and messenger service seemed to us in Kenya, who flew for a living, to indicate a somewhat reckless persistence in the pioneer tradition.

  The available aviation maps of Africa in use at that time all bore the cartographer’s scale mark, ‘I/2,000,000’ — one over two million. An inch on the map was about thirty-two miles in the air, as compared to the flying maps of Europe on which one inch represented no more than four air miles.

  Moreover, it seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.

  Beyond this, it was even more disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: ‘UNSURVEYED.’

  It was as if the mapmakers had said, ‘We are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until you make a forced landing there, we won’t know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle — and the chances are we won’t know then!’

  All this, together with the fact that there was no radio, nor any system designed to check planes in and out of their points of contact, made it essential for a pilot either to develop his intuitive sense to the highest degree or to adopt a fatalistic philosophy toward life. Most of the airmen I knew in Africa at that time managed to do both.

  Flying up from Nungwe on my hunt for Woody, I had clear weather and unlimited visibility. I stayed at an altitude of about five thousand feet to give me the broadest possible scope of clear vision, and zigzagged on my course.

  From the open cockpit I could see straight ahead, or peer backward and down, past the silver wings. The Serengetti lay beneath me like a bowl whose edges were the ends of the earth. It was a bowl full of hot vapours that rose upward in visible waves and exerted physical pressure against the Avian, lifting her, as heat from a smouldering fire lifts a flake of ash.

  Time after time a rock, or a shadow, aided by my imagination, assumed the shape of a crumpled plane or a mass of twisted metal, and I would bank and swing lower and lower over the suspected object until its outlines were sharp and clear — and disappointing again. Every foreign speck in the landscape became a Klemm monoplane come to grief, and every wind-inspired movement of a branch or a clump of bush was, for an instant, the excited signalling of a stranded man.

  About noon I reached Rothschild’s Camp and circled over it. But there was no activity, no life — not even the compact, slow-moving silhouette of a lion. There was nothing but the distinguishing formation of high, grey rocks piled against each other, jutting from the earth like the weather-worn ruins of a desert cathedral.

  I swung north and east with the sun straight above me spilling midday heat on the plain.

  By two o’clock in the afternoon I had covered the district around the Uaso Nyiro River which flows south past the soda basins of Magadi and on to Lake Natron.

  The country here, except for the narrow valley of the river, is an undulating waste of stark ridges like the surface of water sketched in chalk. Not only an aeroplane, but even so small a thing as a pilot’s helmet would be visible against the white crust. But there was neither aeroplane nor pilot’s helmet. There was hardly a shadow, except my own.

  I continued north, feeling a growing urge to sleep, but not really from exhaustion. The thing that contributes most to the loneliness of flying in such empty country for hours on end is the absence of smoke on the horizon. A spiral of smoke in the daytime is like a shaft of light at night. It may be off your course to starboard or port, it may be no more than the poor smudge of a Masai campfire whose keepers are as unaware of you as they are of tomorrow’s worries, but it is a beacon nevertheless; it is a human sign, like a footprint or a matchstick found in the sand.

  But, if there was no smoke to mark the site of a hearthstone or a camp, there were at least other signs of life, not human, but scarcely less welcome for that.

  In a hundred places, as far as I could see and in all directions, little puffs of dust sprang suddenly into being, rolled across the plain and disappeared again. From the air they were like so many jinni, each bursting from the confines of his fabulous and bewitched jar to rush off with the wind on the urgent accomplishment of a long-plotted evil deed, or maybe a good one.

  But when the dust puffs cleared, I could see that small bands of animals were running this way and that, looking everywhere but upward, trying to escape the sound of the plane.

  Between Magadi and Narok I watched a yellow cloud take shape beneath me and just ahead. The cloud clung close to the earth and grew as I approached it into a swaying billow that blunted the sunlight and obscured the grass and mimosa trees in its path.

  Out of its farthest edge the forerunners of a huge herd of impala, wildebeest, and zebra plunged in flight before the shadow of my wings. I circled, throttled down and lost height until my propeller cut into the fringe of the dust, and particles of it burned in my nostrils.

  As the herd moved it became a carpet of rust-brown and grey and dull red. It was not like a herd of cattle or of sheep, because it was wild, and it carried with it the stamp of wilderness and the freedom of a land still more a possession of Nature than of men. 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.

  In the forefront of the herd I could see impala leaping as they ran, and wildebeest flaunting their brittle horns, or flinging themselves on the ground with the abandon of mad dervishes. I do not know why they do this, but whether it is a faulty sense of balance or merely a shameless recourse to the melodramatic, the wildebeest, if frightened by a plane, will always react in the manner of the circus clown in his frantic attempts to escape the trained spotted dog around and around the sawdust arena.

  With apology to clowns, if there are any left, I think the antics of the wildebeest, because they are less studied, are more amusing. This may be due to the fact that the wildebeest has two more legs to trip over — at least when he seems to need them most, they serve him least. When he wants to turn, he pirouettes, and when he wants to run, his progress is continually interrupted by a series of Keystone Comedy nose dives. How he gets from place to place with any dispatch would seem a mystery, but actually he does quite well when all is silent overhead — and there is no audience to watch him.

  But on this occasion the greater part of the game I saw were zebra bucking like unbroken horses, running with tails extended and necks arched, their hooves crushing the tall grass to make a wide hard path behind them.

  So far as I know, zebra are the most useless animals of any size in Africa — useless, that is, to men, because, especially on the Serengetti, lion live on them.

  But to men the zebra is a complete ambiguity. He resembles a donkey, but will not
be trained and cannot stand work; he runs wild like Thompson’s gazelle and eland and eats the same food, but his meat lacks even the doubtful succulence of horse. His hide, while striking in appearance, is only fairly durable and has made its greatest decorative triumph as panelling for the walls of a New York night club. Ostrich and civet cat have contributed more to the requirements of civilized society, but I think it not unjust to say that the zebra clan, in spite of it all, is unaffected by its failure to join in the march of time. I base this conclusion on a very warm friendship that developed, not too long ago to remember, between myself and a young zebra.

  My father, who has raised and trained some of the best Thoroughbreds to come out of Africa, once had a filly named Balmy. He chose all of the names for his horses with painstaking care, sometimes spending many evenings at his desk on our farm at Njoro jotting down possibilities by the light of a kerosene lamp. Balmy was selected for this particular filly because no other name suited her so precisely.

  She was neither vicious nor stubborn, she was very fast on the track, and she responded intelligently to training. Besides her light bay colour and the distinguishing white star on her forehead, her chief peculiarity was an unorthodox point of view toward life. She lived and won races some time before the Noel Coward jargon became commonplace, but, had she made her début on Park Avenue in the middle thirties instead of on the race-course at Nairobi in the middle twenties, she would have been counted as one of those intellectually irresponsible individuals always referred to as being ‘delightfully mad.’ Her madness, of course, consisted simply of a penchant for doing things that, in the opinions of her stable mates, weren’t being done.

  No well-brought-up filly, for instance, while being exercised before the critical watchfulness of her owner, her trainer, and a half-dozen members of the Jockey Club, would come to an abrupt halt beside a mudhole left by last month’s rains, buckle at the knees, and then, before anything could be done about it, roll over in the muck like a Berkshire hog. But Balmy did, as often as there was a mudhole in her path and a trusting rider on her back, though what pleasure she got out of it none of us ever knew. 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.

  On a morning in my thirteenth year when Balmy was due for a canter, I rode her up a long slope that lay north of the farm and was called the Green Hill. All our horses, when doing slow work, were taken up the Green Hill to the place where it overlooked the Rongai Valley, which, in those years, was alive with game.

  Balmy was alert as usual, but it seemed to me there was a pensive quality about the way she touched her neat hooves to the ground, and about the thoughtful tilt of her distinguished head. It was as if she had begun at last to see the error of her ways, and when we reached the crest of the hill, she was behaving as if no filly on God’s earth had ever been so wantonly miscalled. Had there been no herd of zebra to come upon us as we rounded a little group of mimosa trees, Balmy’s resolve to reform might never have been broken or even threatened.

  The zebra were grazing in and out of the mimosa and on the slopes that fell into the valley. There were several hundred of them spread over an area of many acres, but those nearest us were an old dam and her foal of a few months.

  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 edge and this was the wrong time. She had at first ignored the young zebra, but the imperious voice of the old dam at once brought the situation to an issue. There must have been in it not only the call of a mother to its young, but also some cutting reference to Balmy as a pompous, vain creature not fit to be admired by honest folk. At least I am sure that was Balmy’s interpretation.

  She tilted her ears to their most indignant pitch, addressed a low and reassuring note to the renegade foal and then let fly a scream of defiance that might have been heard halfway across the Rongai Valley.

  The details of what followed have never been quite clear in my memory. Balmy’s challenge, clearly well spiced with insult, brought the old dam up on her heels and there ensued a battle of tongues that, in volume of sound and intensity of fury, would have put to shame all the aroused fishwives of literature. In the midst of it Balmy began to sweat, to tremble, and to buck, the old zebra dam galloped in erratic circles, bawling all the while, and the little foal, torn between filial duty and the fatal fascination of the bay filly, bounded and danced between the two like an hysterical child.

  In the end, and in refutation of all the principles of justice, both animal and human, Balmy was triumphant.

  I managed at last to bring her under control and head her toward the farm, but at her heels followed the little zebra foal, still a bit dazed and I think struggling against his own shame, and perhaps even against a minute twinge of remorse.

  Behind us on the slope of the Green Hill, silent and trembling, stood the old dam surrounded by a few of her clan, and I suppose some of them must have been saying, ‘You shouldn’t take it too hard. Children are an ungrateful lot anyway, and it may be all for the best.’

  Months later, after the zebra foal had got the run of the farm, not to say the domination of it, through exercising the same quality of instant decision and unswerving determination he had shown on the morning of his desertion, I went on a visit to Nairobi with my father, and when we returned, the foal was gone, nobody knew where.

  Like a dog he had trotted into my bedroom each morning to nuzzle me out of sleep; he had established a reign of terror in the kitchen by threatening to attack the servants whenever tribute was withheld him. Because of his youth, I had at first pampered him with bottles of warm milk — an error of judgement which resulted in the often-repeated scene of my poor father, his evening pint of beer clutched grimly in his hand, flying through the house and into the garden with the little striped monster, to whom all bottles were now as one, in menacing pursuit.

  In his adoration of Balmy, which never waned, the foal made her stall his own and invested her with such a sense of matronly responsibility that she could be handled even by the syces, and she never rolled in the mud again.

  Punda, as I called him because it is the Swahili word for donkey, went away as he had come, even perhaps with less reason. He may have been received into the herd again like the prodigal son, or he may have been drummed out of it. Animals are not much given to sentiment, so I think it must have been the latter.

  Since then, when I have seen a great herd like that which stampeded under my wings on the Serengetti, I have sometimes watched for an outcast zebra lingering at a distance from its edge. I have thought
he would be full-sized now and getting along in years, but that, friendless or not, he would be content in his half loneliness because he could remember that as a mere child he had been a kind of jester and mascot at court.

  What aimless dreaming! The drone of the plane, the steady sun, the long horizon, had all combined to make me forget for a while that time moved swifter than I, that the afternoon was almost spent, that nowhere was there any sign of Woody.

  Or at least there had been a sign — an unmistakable sign which, but for such errant thoughts on an equally errant zebra foal, I might have seen a little sooner.

  IV

  Why Do We Fly?

  IF YOU WERE TO fly over the Russian steppes in the dead of winter after snow had fallen, and you saw beneath you a date palm green as spring against the white of the land, you might carry on for twenty miles or so before the incongruity of a tropical tree rooted in ice struck against your sense of harmony and made you swing round on your course to look again. You would find that the tree was not a date palm or, if it still persisted in being one, that insanity had claimed you for its own.

  During the five or ten minutes I had watched the herd of game spread like a barbaric invasion across the plain, I had unconsciously observed, almost in their midst, a pool of water bright as a splinter from a glazier’s table.

  I knew that the country below, in spite of its drought-resistant grass, was dry during most of the year. I knew that whatever water holes one did find were opaque and brown, stirred by the feet of drinking game. But the water I saw was not brown; it was clear, and it received the sun and turned it back again in strong sharp gleams of light.