West With the Night

by Beryl Markham

  Tom Black had never taught another soul to fly, and the things he had to teach beyond the simple mechanics that go with flying are those things that have not lent themselves to words. Intuition and instinct are mysteries still, though precisely spelled or rolled precisely off the tongue. Tom had these — or whatever qualities they signify.

  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.

  One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to a familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction. 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.

  ‘Trust this,’ said Tom, ‘but nothing else.’ He meant the compass.

  ‘Instruments can go wrong,’ he said. ‘If you can’t fly without looking at your airspeed and your altimeter and your bank-and-turn indicator — well, then you can’t fly. You’re like somebody who only knows what he thinks after reading his newspaper. But don’t mistrust the compass — your judgement will never be more accurate than that needle. It will tell you where you ought to be going and the rest is up to you.’

  There were ear-phones in the Gipsy Moth, but Tom never used them. While I sat in the rear cockpit, a fumbling beginner, apprehensive and wondering how my hands, so used to strips of leather and my feet so used to stirrups, would ever get used to this, Tom might have eased the task a little by talking into those ear-phones — but he never would. He rolled them up and put them in a corner out of reach. He said: ‘It’s no good my telling you where you go wrong each time you do. Your own intelligence will tell you that. Speed sense, sense of height, and sense of error will come later. If they don’t, well … but they will.’

  That they did was due to him. There was never a more careful pilot nor yet a more casual one. His confidence never shrank beside the bullying roar of a plane. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had a quiet, convincing manner that made him look bigger than any job he ever held and more capable than any craft he ever flew.

  Wilson Airways — the first commercial enterprise of its kind in East Africa — had been the child of Tom’s imagination and foresight. When he undertook to teach me to fly, he was managing director, chief pilot, and guiding spirit of the hopeful little company, but the somewhat pompous executive title had nothing to do with polished desks and swivel chairs.

  Tom’s job was to pioneer new routes, to probe inland Africa, seeking footholds for the future. More often than not, he took off from Nairobi, flying over country as unused to wheels as it was to wings, with no more than a modest expectation that there might be some place to land at the end of his flight.

  And not all of this was done by daylight; he flew without beams, without beacons or radio, through whatever darkness the night could offer — and through whatever weather. There was rarely a light of a village for guidance, nor any highways, nor rails, nor wires, nor farms. He did not call it blind flying; he called it night flying, though when fog or storm required it of him, he flew blind for hours without special instruments, yet not failing on his course. He had what those thick books with dull gray covers call ‘sensory reaction.’

  We flew down into Tanganyika once just after I had got my ‘A’ licence, and it may have been that I was a bit full with the sense of achievement. Or, if I wasn’t, Tom suspected that I might be.

  Near the end of the return trip, flying north toward the Ngong Hills over the Rift Valley, the Gipsy Moth was afflicted with a strange lethargy. I was at the controls and, as the hills (which rise about eight thousand feet above sea level) came closer so that their ravines and green slopes emerged from the lazy haze they live in, I opened the throttle and drew back the stick for altitude. But, it seemed, there wasn’t any more.

  The little plane was doing a respectable eighty miles an hour — hardly record speed even then, but still fast enough to make me appreciate the sad and final consequences of not getting over that close horizon. As I blundered on, the trees of the Ngong Hills began to separate one from another, to stand out individually — even magnificently; the ravines got deeper.

  More stick, more throttle.

  I was calm. Most beginners, I thought, might have got a bit rattled — but not I. Certainly not Tom. He sat in front of me motionless as a drowsing man.

  You can open a throttle just so far and increase the angle of a joy-stick to just such a degree — and if your plane does not respond to this, you had better think of something else. The Moth was not gaining altitude; she was losing that, and her speed. She was heading straight for the implacable hills like a moth hypnotized by light. There was a weight on her wings that I could feel, bearing her down. She could not lift the weight. Tom must have felt it, but he never moved.

  When you can see the branches of trees from a cockpit, and the shape of rocks no bigger than your own hands, and places where grass thins against sand and becomes yellow, and watch the blow of wind on leaves, you are too close. You are so close that thought is a slow process, useless to you now — even if you can think.

  The sound of our propeller got trapped between a wall of rock and the plane before Tom straightened in his seat and took the controls.

  He banked sharply, dusting the trees and rock with blue exhaust. He put the nose of the Gipsy down and swung her deep into the valley while her shadow rode close on the hill. He lost altitude until the valley was flat. He climbed in spirals until we were high above the Ngong Hills, and then he went over them and home.

  It was all so simple.

  ‘Now you know what down-draft is,’ said Tom. ‘You get it near mountains, and in Africa it’s common as rain. I could have warned you — but you shouldn’t be robbed of your right to make mistakes.’

  It was a right he protected as long as we flew together, so that in the end I never did anything in a plane without knowing what might have happened if I had done some other thing.

  A ‘B’ licence is a flyer’s Magna Carta — it delivers him from the bondage of apprenticeship; it frees him to make a living. It says, in effect: ‘We, the undersigned, believe that you are now competent to carry passengers, mail, etc., and we approve of your accepting pay for doing so. Please report to the examiners within three months and, if you have not contracted strabismus, or a melancholy point of view in regard to this Board, we will be happy to renew your permit.’

  About eighteen months after I began to fly, I was granted my ‘B ‘ licence. Under British regulations, this is the ultimate diploma. I had nearly a thousand flying hours to my credit at the time and, if my eyesight had failed me during my preparations for the examinations, it would have been due to the additional hundred or two hours I spent studying navigation out of books whose authors must have been struck dumb in the presence of a one-syllable word. Everything those authors said was sound and sane and reasonable, but they went on the theory that truth is rarer than radium and that if it became easily available, the market for it would be glutted, holders of stock in it would become destitute, and gems of eternal verity would be given away as premiums.

  My life had been, and was, a physically active life, spent in a country many of whose first settlers still tilled their own fields, and whose aboriginals were imaginative enough and legion enough to necessitate the keeping of a King’s regiment in permanent residence at Nairobi, in the outposts, and along the frontiers. Childhood environment had not inclined me toward a bookish existence, nor did flying seem to
me, at first, anything but adventure on wings. That textbooks had to arch their ugly backs in the midst of this pretty dream was a mild blow.

  I had abandoned race-horse training altogether, keeping for myself only Pegasus. Arab Ruta had come with me to Nairobi. He lived in a small house in the native quarter, not far from my own cottage at Muthaiga, and he flew with me often. I do not think that, emotionally at least, the transition from horses to planes was ever complete in Arab Ruta; a thing that moved was a thing alive. He never wiped a plane — he groomed it; and what he couldn’t accomplish easily with his hands, he attempted with soft words. Whenever my Avian came home from a long flight and was dull with dust, Ruta was saddened, not by thoughts of the work at hand, but by the aspect of so vital a creature being used so hard. He would shake his head and touch the fuselage the way he used to touch the loins of a horse — not impulsively, but with animal respect for animal dignity.

  When he had undertaken the care of the plane for only a month, Ruta had already acquired a small entourage of Somalis, Nandi friends, and Kikuyu urchins who hung more or less on his heels, and I suspect on his words. He was not above condescension, but he never stooped to swagger. In any case the pride he took in his new work was wholly genuine. And yet, even in the face of the materialistic and brightly cynical environment of Nairobi, his spiritual integrity held strong. He never deserted his childhood beliefs, and I think they never deserted him.

  Before Tom left Wilson Airways to fly for Lord Furness in England (and later for the Prince of Wales), we used to meet in the evenings over a drink or dinner and talk of our flying or of a thousand other things. I was free-lancing then, carrying mail, passengers, supplies to safaris, or whatever had to be carried, and Tom still worked and sweated away as Ambassador of Progress to the hinterland. Often we left the Nairobi Airfield just after dawn — Tom perhaps bound for Abyssinia and I for the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, or wherever somebody would pay me to go. Sometimes it would be two or three days before we saw each other again, and then there was a lot to talk about. I remember Arab Ruta on these occasions — serving the drinks, or the dinner, understanding very little English, but hovering still about the table, not like a servant, or even like a friend, but like an animate household god, quite as bronze, quite as omniscient, and quite as profound.

  Oddly enough, Ruta the Nandi Murani and Tom Black the English flyer had in common a peculiar quality. Loosely, it might be called a premonitory sense. Tom was not given to psychic revelation, and Ruta — child of Africa or not — was no apostle of black magic, but each was nevertheless sensitive and had an awareness of things to come whenever those things were to affect them closely. One instance of this comes to my mind still, with disturbing frequency.

  Many people who lived in Kenya at that time, or who live there now, remember Denys Finch-Hatton. As a matter of fact there are people all over the world who remember him, because he was of the world and his culture was of it — though I suppose Eton and Oxford might argue a more specific source.

  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.

  I met him first when I was about eighteen, though he had been in Africa for several years — intermittently, at least — and had already got himself a reputation as one of the ablest of White Hunters. He had a physique still remembered in British athletic circles; he was a foremost cricketer. He was a scholar of almost classic profundity, but was less pedantic than an untutored boy. There were occasions when Denys, like all men whose minds have encompassed among other things the foibles of their species, experienced misanthropic moments; he could despair of men, but find poetry in a field of rock.

  As for charm, I suspect Denys invented it, but the meaning of it was a bit different — even in his recent day. It was a charm of intellect and strength, of quick intuition and Voltarian humour. He would have greeted doomsday with a wink — and I think he did.

  My story about his death is simple enough, but it proves for my own satisfaction the truth of a line contained in a remembrance of him which appeared in the London Times:

  ‘Something more must come from one so strong and gifted; and, in a way, it did. …’

  What came from him, if emanate is not the better word, was a force that bore inspiration, spread confidence in the dignity of life, and even gave sometimes a presence to silence.

  I had flown with him often in the plane he had brought by boat from England and which he had added to the little nucleus of wings and fins and fragile wheels on the Nairobi Airfield.

  Denys’ plane was a Gipsy Moth. He had taken up flying too recently to be expert, but the competence which he applied so casually to everything was as evident in the air as it was on one of his safaris or in the recitations of Walt Whitman he performed during his more sombre or perhaps his lighter moments.

  He asked me to fly with him to Voi, one day, and of course I said I would. Voi presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof. It lies south by southeast of Nairobi in the depth of the elephant country — a dry spot in a pocket of dryer hills.

  Denys said he wanted to try something that had never been done before. He said he wanted to see if elephant could be scouted by plane; if they could, he thought, hunters would be willing to pay very well for the service.

  It seemed a good idea to me, even a thrilling idea, and I brought it to Tom in some excitement.

  ‘I’m going down to Voi with Denys. He wants to see how efficiently elephant can be spotted from the air, and if it would be possible to keep a hunting party more or less in touch with a moving herd.’

  Tom leaned against a workbench in the newly built Wilson Airways hangar, jotting figures on a scrap of paper. Archie Watkins, high priest of engine magicians, a big, blond man with a stutter and an almost holy reverence for the hymn of purring pistons, grinned good morning through a thicket of wires and bolts. It was a flyer’s day. The open hangar looked out on the airfield, on the plains, and on a square of sky lonely for clouds.

  Tom stuffed the bit of paper in the leather jacket he always wore, and nodded. ‘Sounds practical enough — up to a point. You’d find a lot more elephant than places to land after you’d found them.’

  ‘I suppose so. But it seems worth trying — Denys’ ideas always are. Anyway, we’re just going to fly out from Voi and back again. No rough landings. If it works out, there should be a good living in it. When you think of all the people who come out here for elephant, and all the time that’s spent, and …’

  ‘I know,’ said Tom, ‘it’s an excellent idea.’ He moved away from the bench and went out of the hangar door and looked at the field. He stood there a minute or so without moving, and then came back.

  ‘Make it tomorrow, Beryl.’

  ‘Weather?’

  ‘No. The weather’s all right. Just make it tomorrow — will you?’

  ‘I suppose I will, if you ask me to, but I don’t see why.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Tom, ‘but there it is.’

  There it was. I went back to my cottage at Muthaiga and worked at bringing my logbook up to date. Denys took off for Voi without me. He took his Kikuyu boy along and flew first to Mombasa, where he had a place on the coast. Landing there, his propeller was chipped by a coral fragment and he wired Tom for a spare.

  Tom sent it down with a Native mechanic, though Denys had been adamant about needing no help. In any case the new propeller was fitted and, a day later, Denys and the Kikuyu boy took off again, back-tracking inland to Voi.

  On the evening of the day they arrived there, Tom and I had dinner at Muthaiga. He was neither silent nor morose, but not much was said about Denys. I had the feeling that Tom felt a bit foolish about preventing me from making the trip. Anyway, we talked about other things. Tom was thinking of returning to England, s
o we thought about that and talked about it together.

  I had lunch the next day in my cottage. Arab Ruta cooked it as usual, served it as usual, and acted as usual. But about an hour later, while I was working out some unworkable nuggets of navigation, Ruta knocked at my door. It was a very shy knock and he looked shy when he came in. He looked like someone with a lot to think about, but nothing to say, though he got it out at last.

  ‘Memsahib, have you heard from Makanyaga?’

  Makanyaga was Denys. To Arab Ruta, and to most of the Natives who knew Denys, he was Makanyaga. It seemed an opprobrious epithet, but it wasn’t. It means, ‘To Tread Upon.’ Bwana Finch-Hatton, the argument ran, can tread upon inferior men with his tongue. He can punish with a word — and that is a wonderful skill.

  It was indeed, since Denys rarely used it on any but those whose pretensions, at least, marked them as his equals. And then he used it with profligate generosity.

  I closed my books. ‘No, Ruta. Why should I hear from Makanyaga? ‘

  ‘I do not know, Memsahib. I wondered.’

  ‘Is there something to hear?’

  Ruta shrugged. ‘I have heard nothing, Memsahib. It may be that there is nothing. It occurred to me to ask you — but, of course, Bwana Black would know.’

  Bwana Black knew soon enough, and so did I. We sat in the Wilson Airways office later that same afternoon when the Voi District Commissioner telephoned to say that Denys and his Kikuyu boy were dead. Their plane had taken off from the runway, circled twice, and then dived to the earth, where it burned. No one ever learned why.

  Tom had kept me from a trip and Arab Ruta had asked a question. They had known, and I have wondered how they knew, and I have found an answer for myself.