West With the Night

by Beryl Markham

Like the date palm on the Russian steppes, this crystal pool in the arid roughness of the Serengetti was not only incongruous, it was impossible. And yet, without the slightest hesitation, I flew over it and beyond it until it was gone from sight and from my thoughts.

  There is no twilight in East Africa. Night tramps on the heels of Day with little gallantry and takes the place she lately held, in severe and humourless silence. Sounds of the things that live in the sun are quickly gone — and with them the sounds of roving aeroplanes, if their pilots have learned the lessons there are to learn about night weather, distances that seem never to shrink, and the perfidy of landing fields that look like aerodromes by day, but vanish in darkness.

  I watched small shadows creep from the rocks and saw birds in black flocks homeward bound to the scattered bush, and I began to consider my own home and a hot bath and food. Hope always persists beyond reason, and it seemed futile to nurse any longer the expectation of finding Woody with so much of the afternoon already gone. If he were not dead, he would of course light fires by night, but already my fuel was low, I had no emergency rations — and no sleep.

  I had touched my starboard rudder, altering my course east for Nairobi, when the thought first struck me that the shining bit of water I had so calmly flown over was not water at all, but the silvered wings of a Klemm monoplane bright and motionless in the path of the slanting sun.

  It was not really a thought, of course, nor even one of those blinding flashes of realization that come so providentially to the harried heroes of fiction. It was no more than a hunch. But where is there a pilot foolhardy enough to ignore his hunches? I am not one. 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.

  But before considering any of this, I had already reversed my direction, lost altitude, and opened the throttle again. It was a race with racing shadows, a friendly trial between the sun and me.

  As I flew, my hunch became conviction. Nothing in the world, I thought, could have looked so much like reflecting water as the wings of Woody’s plane. I remembered how bright those wings had been when last I saw them, freshly painted to shine like silver or stainless steel. Yet they were only of flimsy wood and cloth and hardened glue.

  The deception had amused Woody. ‘All metal,’ he would say, jerking a thumb toward the Klemm; ‘all metal, except just the wings and fuselage and prop and little things like that. Everything else is metal — even the engine.’

  Even the engine! — as much of a joke to us as to the arrant winds of Equatorial Africa; a toy engine with bustling manner and frantic voice; an hysterical engine, guilty at last perhaps of what, in spite of Woody’s jokes and our own, we all had feared.

  Now almost certainly guilty, I thought, for there at last was what I hunted — not an incredible pool of water, but, unmistakable this time, the Klemm huddled to earth like a shot bird, not crushed, but lifeless and alone, beside it no fire, not even a stick with a fluttering rag.

  I throttled down and banked the Avian in slow, descending circles.

  I might have had a pious prayer for Woody on my lips at that moment, but I didn’t have. I could only wonder if he had been hurt and taken into a manyatta by some of the Masai Murani, or if, idiotically, he had wandered into the pathless country in search of water and food. I even damned him slightly, I think, because, as I glided to within five hundred feet of the Klemm, I could see that it was unscathed.

  There can be a strange confusion of emotions at such a moment. The sudden relief I felt in knowing that at least the craft had not been damaged was, at the same time, blended with a kind of angry disappointment at not finding Woody, perhaps hungry and thirsty, but anyhow alive beside it.

  Rule one for forced landings ought to be, ‘Don’t give up the ship.’ Woody of all people should have known this — did know it, of course, but where was he?

  Circling again, I saw that in spite of a few pig-holes and scattered rocks, a landing would be possible. About thirty yards from the Klemm there was a natural clearing blanketed with short, tawny grass. From the air I judged the length of the space to be roughly a hundred and fifty yards — not really long enough for a plane without brakes, but long enough with such head wind as there was to check her glide.

  I throttled down, allowing just enough revs to prevent the ship from stalling at the slow speed required to land in so small a space. Flattening out and swinging the tail from side to side in order to get what limited vision I could at the ground below and directly ahead, I flew in gently and brought the Avian to earth in a surprisingly smooth run. I made a mental note at the time that the take-off, especially if Woody were aboard, might be a good deal more difficult.

  But there was no Woody.

  I climbed out, got my dusty and dented water bottle from the locker, and walked over to the Klemm, motionless and still glittering in the late light. I stood in front of her wings and saw no sign of mishap, and heard nothing. There she rested, frail and feminine, against the rough, grey ground, her pretty wings unmarked, her propeller rakishly tilted, her cockpit empty.

  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.

  With the water bottle swinging from my hand on its long leather strap, like an erratic pendulum, I walked around Woody’s plane. But even with shadows flooding the earth like slow-moving water and the grass whispering under the half-spent breath of the wind, there was no feeling of gloom or disaster.

  The silence that belonged to the slender little craft was, I thought, filled with malice — a silence holding the spirit of wanton mischief, like the quiet smile of a vain woman exultant over a petty and vicious triumph.

  I had expected little else of the Klemm, frivolous and inconstant as she was, but I knew suddenly that Woody was not dead. It was not that kind of silence.

  I found a path with the grass bent down and little stones scuffed from their hollows, and I followed it past some larger stones into a tangle of thorn trees. I shouted for Woody and got nothing but my own voice for an answer, but when I turned my head to shout again, I saw two boulders leaning together, and in the cleft they made were a pair of legs clothed in grimy work slacks and, beyond the legs, the rest of Woody, face down with his head in the crook of his arm.

  I went over to where he was, unscrewed the cap of the water bottle and leaned down and shook him.

  ‘It’s Beryl,’ I called, and shook him harder. One of the legs moved and then the other. Life being hope, I got hold of his belt and tugged.

  Woody began to back out of the cleft of the rocks with a motion irrelevantly reminiscent of the delectable crayfish of the South of France. He was mumbling, and I recalled that men dying of thirst are likely to mumble and that what they want is water. I poured a few drops on the back of his neck as it appeared and got, for my pains, a startled grunt. It was followed by a few of those exquisite words common to the vocabularies of sailors, airplane pilots, and stevedores — and then abruptly Woody was sitting upright on the ground, his face skinny beneath a dirty beard, his lips cinder-dry and split, his eyes red-rimmed and sunk in his cheeks. He was a sick man and he was grinning.


  ‘I resent being treated like a corpse,’ he said. ‘It’s insulting. Is there anything to eat?’

  I once knew a man who, at each meeting with a friend, said, ‘Well, well — it’s a small world after all!’ He must be very unhappy now, because, when I last saw him, friends were slipping from his orbit like bees from a jaded flower and his world was becoming lonely and large. But there was truth in his dreary platitude. I have the story of Bishon Singh to prove it and Woody to witness it.

  Bishon Singh arrived in a little billow of dust when there was nothing left of the sun but its forehead, and Woody and I had made insincere adieus to the Klemm and were preparing to take off for Nairobi and a doctor — and a new magneto, if one could be had.

  ‘There’s a man on a horse,’ said Woody.

  But it wasn’t a man on a horse.

  I had helped Woody into the front cockpit of the Avian, and I stood alongside the craft ready to swing her propeller, when the little billow made its entrance into our quasi-heroic scene. Six wagging and tapered ears protruded from the crest of the billow, and they were the ears of three donkeys. Four faces appeared in four halos of prairie dust, and three of these were the faces of Kikuyu boys. The fourth was the face of Bishon Singh, dark, bearded, and sombre.

  ‘You won’t believe it,’ I said to Woody, ‘but that is an Indian I’ve known from childhood. He worked for years on my father’s farm.’

  ‘I’ll believe anything you tell me,’ said Woody, ‘if only you get me out of here.’

  ‘Beru! Beru!’ said Bishon Singh, ‘or do I dream?’

  Bishon Singh is a Sikh and as such he wears his long black hair braided to his long black beard, and together they make a cowl, like a monk’s.

  His face is small and stern and it peers from the cowl with nimble black eyes. They can be kind, or angry, like other eyes, but I do not think they can be gay. I have never seen them gay.

  ‘Beru!’ he said again. ‘I do not believe this. This is not Njoro. It is not the farm at Njoro, or the Rongai Valley. It is more than a hundred miles from there — but here you are, tall and grown up, and I am an old man on my way to my Duka with things to sell. But we meet. We meet with all these years behind us. I do not believe it! Walihie Mungu Yangu — I do not believe it. God has favoured me!’

  ‘It’s a small world,’ groaned Woody from the plane.

  ‘Na furie sana ku wanana na wewe,’ I said to Bishon Singh in Swahili. ‘I am very happy to see you again.’

  He was dressed as I had always remembered him — thick army boots, blue puttees, khaki breeches, a ragged leather waistcoat, all of it surmounted by a great turban, wound, as I recalled it, from at least a thousand yards of the finest cotton cloth. As a child, that turban had always intrigued me; there was so much of it and so little of Bishon Singh.

  We stood a few yards in front of his three nodding donkeys, each with a silent Kikuyu boy in attendance, and each with an immense load on its back — pots, tin pans, bales of cheap Bombay prints, copper wire to make Masai earrings and bracelets. There was even tobacco, and oil for the Murani to use in the braiding of their hair.

  There were things made of leather, things of paper, things of celluloid and rubber, all bulging, dangling, and bursting from the great pendulous packs. Here was Commerce, four-footed and halting, slow and patient, unhurried, but sure as tomorrow, beating its way to a counter in the African hinterland.

  Bishon Singh raised an arm and included both the Klemm and the Avian in its sweep.

  ‘N’dege!’ he said — ‘the white man’s bird! You do not ride on them, Beru?’

  ‘I fly one of them, Bishon Singh.’

  I said it sadly, because the old man had pointed with his left arm and I saw that his right was withered and crippled and useless. It had not been like that when I had seen him last.

  ‘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.

  ‘My friend was stranded here,’ I said to Bishon Singh, ‘his n’dege — the one that shines like a new rupee — is broken. We are going back to Nairobi.’

  ‘Walihie! Walihie! It is over a hundred miles, Beru, and the night is near. I will unpack my donkeys and brew hot tea. It is a long way to Nairobi — even for you who go with the wind.’

  ‘We will be there in less than an hour, Bishon Singh. It would take you as long to build a fire and make the tea.’

  I put my hand out and the old Sikh grasped it and held it for a moment very tightly, just as he had often held it some ten years ago when he was still taller than I — even without his fantastic turban. Only then he had used his right hand. He looked down at it now with a smile on his thin lips.

  ‘What was it?’ I asked.

  ‘Simba, Beru — lion.’ He shrugged. ‘One day on the way to Ikoma … it makes us like brothers, you and me. Each has been torn by a lion. You remember that time at Kabete when you were a little child?’

  ‘I’ll never forget it.’

  ‘Nor I,’ said Bishon Singh.

  I turned and went forward to the propeller of the Avian and grasped the highest blade with my right hand and nodded to Woody. He sat in the front cockpit ready to switch on.

  Bishon Singh moved backward a few steps, close to his Tom Thumb cavalcade. The three donkeys left off their meagre feeding, raised their heads and tilted their ears. The Kikuyu boys stood behind the donkeys and waited. In the dead light the Klemm had lost her brilliance and was only the sad and discredited figure of an aerial Jezebel.

  ‘God will keep you,’ said Bishon Singh.

  ‘Good-bye and good fortune!’ I called.

  ‘Contact!’ roared Woody and I swung the prop.

  He lay, at last, on a bed in the small neat shack of the East African Aero Club waiting for food, for a drink — and, I suspect, for sympathy.

  ‘The Klemm is a bitch,’ he said. ‘No man in his right mind should ever fly a Klemm aeroplane, with a Pobjoy motor, in Africa. You treat her kindly, you nurse her engine, you put silver dope on her wings, and what happens?’

  ‘The magneto goes wrong,’ I said.

  ‘It’s like a woman with nerves,’ said Woody, ‘or no conscience, or even an imbecile!’

  ‘Oh, much worse.’

  ‘Why do we fly?’ said Woody. ‘We could do other things. We could work in offices, or have farms, or get into the Civil Service. We could …’

  ‘We could give up flying tomorrow. You could, anyhow. You could walk away from your plane and never put your feet on a rudder bar again. You could forget about weather and night flights and forced landings, and passengers who get airsick, and spare parts that you can’t find, and wonderful new ships that you can’t buy. You could forget all that and go off somewhere away from Africa and never look at an aerodrome again. You might be a very happy man, so why don’t you?’

  ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ said Woody. ‘It would all be so dull.’

  ‘It can be dull anyway.’

  ‘Even with lions tearing you to bits at Kabete?’

  ‘Oh, that was back in my childhood. Some day I’ll write a book and you can read about it.’

  ‘God forbid!’ said Woody.

  BOOK TWO

  V

  He Was a Good Lion

  WHEN I WAS A child, I spent all my days with the Nandi Murani, hunting barefooted, in the Rongai Valley, or in the cedar forests of the Mau Escarpment.

  At first I was not permitted to carry a spear, but the Murani depended on nothing else.

  You cannot hunt an animal with such a weapon unless you know the way of his life. You must know the things he loves, the things he fears, the paths he will follow. You must be sure of the quality of his speed and the measure of his courage. He will know as much about you, and at times make better use of it.

  But my Murani friends we
re patient with me.

  ‘Amin yut!’ one would say, ‘what but a dik-dik will run like that? Your eyes are filled with clouds today, Lakweit!’

  That day my eyes were filled with clouds, but they were young enough eyes and they soon cleared. There were other days and other dik-dik. There were so many things.

  There were dik-dik and leopard, kongoni and warthog, buffalo, lion, and the ‘hare that jumps.’ There were many thousands of the hare that jumps.

  And there were wildebeest and antelope. There was the snake that crawls and the snake that climbs. There were birds, and young men like whips of leather, like rainshafts in the sun, like spears before a singiri.

  ‘Amin yut!’ the young men would say, ‘that is no buffalo spoor, Lakweit. Here! Bend down and look. Bend down and look at this mark. See how this leaf is crushed. Feel the wetness of this dug. Bend down and look so that you may learn!’

  And so, in time, I learned. But some things I learned alone.

  There was a place called Elkington’s Farm by Kabete Station. It was near Nairobi on the edge of the Kikuyu Reserve, and my father and I used to ride there from town on horses or in a buggy, and along the way my father would tell me things about Africa.

  Sometimes he would tell me stories about the tribal wars — wars between the Masai and the Kikuyu (which the Masai always won), or between the Masai and the Nandi (which neither of them ever won), and about their great leaders and their wild way of life which, to me, seemed much greater fun than our own. He would tell me of Lenana the brilliant Masai ol-oiboni, who prophesied the coming of the White Man, ad of Lenana’s tricks and stratagems and victories, and about how his people were unconquerable and unconquered — until, in retaliation against the refusal of the Masai warriors to join the King’s African Rifles, the British marched upon the Native villages; how, inadvertently, a Masai woman was killed, and how two Hindu shopkeepers were murdered in reprisal by the Murani. And thus, why it was that the thin, red line of Empire had grown slightly redder.