West With the Night

by Beryl Markham

  Denys was a keystone in an arch whose other stones were other lives. If a keystone trembles, the arch will carry the warning along its entire curve, then, if the keystone is crushed, the arch will fall, leaving its lesser stones heaped close together, though for a while without design.

  Denys’ death left some lives without design, but they were rebuilt again, as lives and stones are, into other patterns.

  XVI

  Ivory and Sansevieria

  ONE DAY, WHEN THE world was many months older, which is to say ages older, the mail brought a letter from Tom. He had long since flown to a new job in England and had not come back.

  Three times I had flown the same six-thousand-mile route, but each time I had returned like the needle on my own compass returning to its magnetic meridian. There was no opiate for nostalgia, or at least no lasting cure, and my Avian — my little VP-KAN — shared with me the homing sense.

  Things had changed too in Kenya. My father was there again, back from Peru, and I had a farm at Elburgon, where he lived. The farm was not like the farm at Njoro, but it made the memory of that more real, and the Rongai Valley and the Mau Forest were close on its edges.

  Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead. It had followed the constant pattern of discard and growth that all lives follow. Things had passed, new things had come. The wonder of my first fledgling hours of flight was lost in the many hundreds of hours I had sat making my living at the controls of my plane. Month after month I had piloted the mail for East African Airways — until that optimistic commercial effort had itself died and been buried under the growing success of Wilson Airways. I had carried passengers in all directions, and because there were more than could be carried, I had leased a bigger plane — a Leopard Moth — and added that to my fleet of one.

  I flew the Leopard when I had two passengers. Each paid me a shilling a mile — and there are miles and miles of Africa. I got the same rate, of course, when I used the Avian for one passenger, and between the two planes I managed a monthly income of about sixty pounds sterling.

  For a while I had thought that this was good enough — but five times that was better. Seventy-five pounds a month and three pounds for each flying hour was better. It didn’t matter much that no one else wanted the job. Life itself could be better, and I had made it so.

  Elephant! Safari! Hunting! Denys Finch-Hatton had left me a legacy of excitement — a release from routine, a passport to adventure. Elephant could be scouted by air. Denys had thought it, I had proved it — and Tom warned against it. This is his letter:

  The Royal Aero Club

  119 Piccadilly

  London, W.l.

  My dear Beryl:

  I have just come up from the Newmarket races and found your last letter waiting at the Club. I am awfully upset to hear that you have been so ill, but trust that by now you have completely recovered. It seems to me that you are rather overdoing it — living on your nerves too much … you have got to be capable of accepting non-hazardous, ordinary, sane, dull, everyday work that requires a balanced brain and steady reasoning.

  All this is really to tell you that if you had one grain of sense, you wouldn’t make a regular habit of flying for elephant in elephant country. Financial worry may be eased by one or two safaris, but as a steady business it’s sheer madness and damnably, bloodily dangerous.

  You won’t listen, but anyway I’m glad the Avian seems a faithful servant. I only hope it keeps ticking over and serving you loyally for just as long as you need it ….

  I badly want to get into harness again. Duke is in the South of France and I haven’t heard from him for a long time. I want the opportunity of busting the Cape record, but it’s hard to make money with such a flight unless you sell your shirt and your soul to advertising agents — which I have no intention of doing ….

  Did you get your spares in time? I telephoned your cablegram to Avros and they told me they would get on with the order immediately ….

  Give up the elephant flying — it’s not worth the chances you have to take. Good luck, and my very best,

  TOM

  By wire (same day)

  MAKINDU

  KENYA COLONY

  BERYL

  BE AT MAKINDU TOMORROW SEVEN A.M. STOP BRING WINSTON’S MAIL STOP CALL AT MANLEY’S AND COLLECT FIFTY ROUNDS AMMUNITION SIX BOTTLES GIN SIX BOTTLES WHISKY TWO BOTTLES ATEBRIN TWO BOTTLES PLASMA QUININE STOP MAKULA REPORTS HERD ELEPHANT WITH BIG BULL STOP BABU AT MAKINDU WILL SUPPLY WRITTEN DIRECTIONS FROM ME ON ARRIVAL STOP IF FISH DAY BRING FISH

  BLIX

  Stop. Everything is available, including the fish, shipped up from Mombasa. I’m available too. Tom Black’s letter glares at me from my desk at Muthaiga Club — and he’s right as rain. He’s always right. What I have learned about flying I have learned from him and he knows the Ukamba elephant country better than I do. He knows about the quick storms sweeping inland from the coast; he knows about dysentery, tsetse fly, and malaria; he knows about the sansevieria — that placid, but murderous weed, jutting up like an endless crop of sabres from the wide waste that sinks to the Indian Ocean.

  Land on sansevieria and your plane is skewered like a duck pinned for taxidermy — land in it and walk away. Only not fast, nor far. Rest for a moment; take your time. There are no lion to speak of, and few, if any leopard. There is only the Siafu ant.

  What eulogies have been written about the ant! ‘Sturdy fellow, honest fellow, thrifty fellow!’ I would not wish, even upon a misguided entomologist, no matter what his extra-academic sins might be, a single night in company with Siafu ants.

  The Siafu is sturdy enough, God knows, but he is neither honest nor thrifty — he is a thief, a wastrel, and a man-eater. The biggest of his species is half the length of a matchstick, and, given time, he can (and would) gnaw through all the matchsticks in Christendom if there were a bit of meat, live or otherwise, at the end of his labours.

  Siafu don’t just sting — they bite chunks out of you. Within a few hours a normal, healthy horse, if he is unable to escape his stable, can be killed and half-eaten by even a reserve division of Siafu.

  I have dreamed about a lot of unpleasant things — as I suppose we all have — snakes, drowning, leopard, falling off high places; but the dreams I have had about Siafu, in my bed, under the floor, in my hair, relegate all other bad dreams to the category of unlikely but tranquil hallucinations. Give me beetles and bugs, spiders, puff-adders, and tarantulas like buttons of cosy wool — but not Siafu. They are minions of the Devil — red, minute, numberless, and inexorable.

  I think about them, and about all the disadvantages attendant upon the business of scouting elephant by plane. Tom’s letter is not detailed — but then it needn’t be. Neither he nor I have any illusions about the availability of clear places to land anywhere south, or east of Makindu. Most people in East Africa have heard about that country.

  The Ukamba is flat enough on a map — even on my flying map. It spreads east from Nairobi, north to the frontier, southeast to the Indian Ocean. It is circled by the Tana River and by the Athi — both sucking their lazy lives from the Kenya Highlands. They enclose the Ukamba like a frayed noose dropped to earth by an intrigued Satan, to mark a theatre for later labours. The country is bush, sansevieria, fever, and drought. The sansevieria is everywhere; the bush is fathoms deep, impenetrable as submarine growth in the buried fields of the sea. It is no country for men, but it is country for elephants. And so men go there.

  Blix went there often, but Blix was Blix. Tom, on the other hand was Tom, level-headed for all his dreaming, only perhaps he hadn’t realized how committed I had already become to the business of scouting for game. The cheques, at the end of each safari, were pleasant narcotics against what disturbing memories I may have brought back, the work was exciting — and life was not dull.

  BABU AT MAKINDU WILL SUPPLY WRITTEN DIRECTIONS

  BLIX

  Blix — Blickie — Baron
von Blixen. He is, and was, known variously by any of these names, and by several others — none of them harsh. He is six feet of amiable Swede and, to my knowledge, the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever to snicker at the fanfare of safari or to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whisky. If Blix has ever yielded to embarrassment before any situation, it must have been when he confronted himself with the task of writing his admirable, but all too shy, record of his work in Africa. The book, to those who know him, is a monument of understatement. In it he has made molehills out of all the mountains he has climbed, and passed off as incidents true stories that a less modest man might enlarge to blood-curdling sagas.

  Blix’s appreciation of the melodramatic is non-existent. So far as I know, he has never stood off an attack by two or three hundred naked savages (single-handed with only one bullet in his rifle) while bleeding profusely from the left thigh, and such imperfections in his hunting career may mark him as pretty poor cinema material. When, as often happened, he met certain Natives more or less committed to nudism, not to say mayhem, he invariably ended up by swapping yarns with the chief, while the young warriors tiptoed past the conversation, and gourds full of tembo were served in the shade of whatever hut or tree did service as the Throne Room.

  To say that Baron von Blixen, as a White Hunter, was cool in the face of danger is both hackneyed and slightly inaccurate. In the first place, he never threw himself into the face of danger if that could be avoided; secondly, if by chance he found himself (or anyone else) in a dangerous situation, he was inclined to grow hot rather than cold, blasphemous rather than silent.

  But these outward manifestations were so much less important than the fact that he never did the wrong thing — and never missed what he shot at.

  ‘Bwana Blixen’ is still a name that, in many places, from Rhodesia to the Belgian Congo, to the Sahara Desert, would fall upon more than a few ears with the quick familiarity of an echo.

  To find it appended to a telegram from Makindu, even after a long friendship, was still too compelling a thrill to be disregarded.

  Muthaiga Club

  Nairobi

  Kenya Colony

  Dear Tom:

  The parts for the Avian arrived here in time — due entirely to your quick action. One day I’ll have a tail wheel instead of a skid and won’t tear it off on rough landings.

  Don’t worry about the elephant scouting. I know you’re absolutely right, and I intend to quit it as soon as I can — but Blix wired today from Makindu and I’m going down in the morning. It’s Winston Guest’s safari.

  Tail winds and happy landings.

  As always

  BERYL

  By the aid of a blue string of smoke, indicating, though halfheartedly, the list of the wind, I land the Avian on the muram clearing at Makindu, clamber out, and walk over to the station.

  Makindu doesn’t look like anything; it isn’t anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine. The biggest of them — the station — contains a table and Blix’s Babu, wearing his forefinger out on a telegraph key.

  One day there will be a small but select company of Hindus wandering about Africa — each possessing the distinctive attribute of a thwarted forefinger. They will be the descendants of the original station masters on the original Uganda Railway. I have arrived by plane, foot, or horse during all hours of the day or night at one or another of the thirty-odd stations in Kenya and have never yet found the telegraph key without its Babu leaning over it, pounding like mad, as if the whole of East Africa were rapidly sliding into the Indian Ocean and he alone had observed the phenomenon.

  I have no idea of what they really talked about. Possibly I do the Babus an injustice, but I think at best they used to read the novels of Anthony Trollope to each other over the wire.

  The Babu at Makindu reeled off an impressive lot of dots and dashes before he looked up from his table. He had kind, brown eyes, a little weary from squinting, and a small head wrinkled like a well-cured nut. He wore cheap twill trousers that were dirty and a cotton shirt that was clean. He stood up, finally, and bowed: ‘I have message for you from Baron.’

  There was a spindle on his table containing three pieces of paper of different colour, size, and shape. I could recognize Blix’s handwriting on the top one, but the Babu shuffled importantly through the three scraps as if they were a hundred. At last he handed me my directions with the exultant smile of a bank manager handing you the notation of an overdraft.

  ‘My wife — she have tea for you.’

  Tea, as brewed by the wives of station Babus, is mostly sugar and raw ginger, but it is always hot. I had tea and read Blix’s directions.

  ‘Get to Kilamakoy. Look for smoke.’ Underneath was a quickly scribbled drawing, complete with arrows and a circle labelled ‘Camp.’

  I thanked my hosts for their tea, went out to my plane, swung the propeller, flew straight to Kilamakoy (which is not a settlement, but a Wakamba word for a stretch of country without residential possibilities), and looked for smoke.

  After a while I saw a miserly runway, walled in bush, with a white man at either end — each beckoning with such enthusiasm that I concluded the gin, rather than the quinine, was the nostrum immediately required.

  XVII

  I May Have to Shoot Him

  I SUPPOSE, IF THERE were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.

  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.

  Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves — Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets — and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.

  The elephant is a rational animal. He thinks. Blix and I (also rational animals in our own right) have never quite agreed on the mental attributes of the elephant. I know Blix is not to be doubted because he has learned more about elephant than any other man I ever met, or even heard about, but he looks upon legend with a suspicious eye, and I do not.

  There is a legend that elephant dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of these has ever been discovered. In support of this, there is only the fact that the body of an elephant, unless he had been trapped or shot in his tracks, has rarely been found. What happens to the old and diseased?

  Not only natives, but many white settlers, have supported for years the legend (if it is legend) that elephant will carry their wounded and their sick hundreds of miles, if necessary, to keep them out of the hands of their enemies. And it is said that elephant never forget.

  These are perhaps just stories born of imagination. Ivory was once almost as precious as gold, and wherever there is treasure, men mix it with mystery. But still, there is no mystery about the things you see yourself.

  I think I am the first person ever to scout elephant by plane, and so it follows that the thousands of elephant I saw time and again from the air had never before been plagued by anything above their heads more ominous than tick-birds.

&nbs
p; The reaction of a herd of elephant to my Avian was, in the initial instance, always the same — they left their feeding ground and tried to find cover, though often, before yielding, one or two of the bulls would prepare for battle and charge in the direction of the plane if it were low enough to be within their scope of vision. Once the futility of this was realized, the entire herd would be off into the deepest bush.

  Checking again on the whereabouts of the same herd next day, I always found that a good deal of thinking had been going on amongst them during the night. On the basis of their reaction to my second intrusion, I judged that their thoughts had run somewhat like this: A: The thing that flew over us was no bird, since no bird would have to work so hard to stay in the air — and, anyway, we know all the birds. B: If it was no bird, it was very likely just another trick of those two-legged dwarfs against whom there ought to be a law. C: The two-legged dwarfs (both black and white) have, as long as our long memories go back, killed our bulls for their tusks. We know this because, in the case of the white dwarfs, at least, the tusks are the only part taken away.

  The actions of the elephant, based upon this reasoning, were always sensible and practical. The second time they saw the Avian, they refused to hide; instead, the females, who bear only small, valueless tusks, simply grouped themselves around their treasure-burdened bulls in such a way that no ivory could be seen from the air or from any other approach.

  This can be maddening strategy to an elephant scout. I have spent the better part of an hour circling, criss-crossing, and diving low over some of the most inhospitable country in Africa in an effort to break such a stubborn huddle, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

  But the tactics vary. More than once I have come upon a large and solitary elephant standing with enticing disregard for safety, its massive bulk in clear view, but its head buried in thicket. This was, on the part of the elephant, no effort to simulate the nonsensical habit attributed to the ostrich. It was, on the contrary, a cleverly devised trap into which I fell, every way except physically, at least a dozen times. The beast always proved to be a large cow rather than a bull, and I always found that by the time I had arrived at this brilliant if tardy deduction, the rest of the herd had got another ten miles away, and the decoy, leering up at me out of a small, triumphant eye, would amble into the open, wave her trunk with devastating nonchalance, and disappear.