West With the Night

by Beryl Markham

  I awaken long before dawn at such times and always find Ruta ready with my cup of steaming tea, and I drink it, looking at the fading stars that are caught in the triangle of my open tent.

  It is always misty when Ruta and I remove the canvas covers from the engine, the propeller, and the cockpit. Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth. I take off in dead air with the accessories of my singular occupation arranged in their proper places.

  There are the message bags stacked in two specially made boxes of teak that stand on either side of me on the floor of the cockpit. The bags are handsome things, in their way. I carry over a dozen of them — tough little brown pouches, leaded, and fitted with long streamers of blue-and-gold silk, for visibility. Blue-and-gold had been my racing colours; they are flying colours now.

  There is my note pad fixed on a board and hung with straps to fasten on my thigh, and the quiver of pencils I carry with it. What frantic scribbling that pad and those pencils are a party to!

  And there is my vial of morphine. I keep it, like a fetish, in the pocket of my flying jacket because the senior medical officer at Nairobi has told me to keep it, and has mumbled of forced landings in inaccessible wastelands and crackups in the depths of forests that men could hardly reach — in time. He has been insistent about this precaution, making me return the unopened vial at intervals, exchanging it for a fresher one. ‘You never can tell,’ he invariably says, ‘you never can tell!’

  And so equipped, I wave kwaheri to Ruta each day in the rheumy morning light, fly until I sight the smoke of the hunters’ camp, and dip my wings to greet them. Then I am off over the rolling ocean of bush to find their quarry — and, when I find it, what a thrill it is, what a satisfying moment!

  Sometimes I circle a herd for nearly an hour, trying to determine the size of its largest bull. If at last I decide that he carries enough ivory, my work begins. I must figure the course from the herd to the hunters’ camp, reverse the course, jot it down on my pad, judge the distance, give details of terrain, warn of other animals in the vicinity, note water holes, and indicate safest approach.

  I must find my smoke signal again, keeping an eye on the compass, a hand free for scribbling, and my course and distance calculator ready, should I need it. I feel triumphant when I can drop a note like this which Blix has returned to me and is still folded in my logbook:

  Very big bull — tusks quite even — my guess over 180-pounder. In herd of about 500. Two other bulls and many babies in herd — grazing peacefully. Dense growth — high trees — two water holes — one about half-mile from herd NNE. Other about two miles WNW. Fairly open ground between you and herd, with open glade halfway. Many tracks. Large herd buffalo S.W. of elephant. No rhino sighted. Your course 220 degrees. Distance about ten miles. Will be back in one hour. Work hard, trust in God, and keep your bowels open — Oliver Cromwell

  Well, Cromwell did say it, and it still makes sense.

  All of it makes sense — the smoke, the hunt, the fun, the danger. What if I should fly away one morning and not come back? What if the Avian fails me? I fly much too low, of necessity, to pick a landing spot (assuming that there might be a landing spot) in such a case. No, if the engine fails me, if a quick storm drives me into the bush and sansivera — well, that is the chance and that is the job. Anyway, Blix has told Farah and Ruta what to do if I am ever gone for a longer time than my supply of petrol might be expected to last — get to a telegraph by foot or lorry, and wire Nairobi. Maybe somebody like Woody would begin the search.

  Meanwhile, haven’t I got two quarts of water, a pound of biltong — and the doctor’s bottled sleep (should I be hors de combat and the Siafu hungry that night)? I certainly have, and, moreover, I am not defenceless. I have a Lüger in my locker — a gun that Tom has insisted on my carrying, and which can be used as a short rifle simply by adjusting its emergency stock. What could be better? I am an expedition by myself, complete with rations, a weapon, and a book to read — Air Navigation, by Weems.

  All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost soul seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer.

  ‘Beryl — wake up!’ Blix roars. Winston stirs and something scuttles through the bush in fright.

  ‘I’m not asleep, I tell you. I’m thinking.’

  ‘About England?’

  ‘Yes — about England.’

  ‘All right.’ Blix stands up and yawns and stretches so that the shadows of his arms before the firelight embrace all of the Africa our eyes can see.

  ‘All right,’ he says again — ‘when do we leave?’

  ‘I’m going to Elburgon first,’ I say, ‘to see my father. After that, if you really want to come along, we’re off.’

  Elburgon is not a town; it is just a station on the Uganda Railway, one of many entrances to a broad, familiar country. There, as at Njoro, my house looks over the Rongai Valley and, as at Njoro, the Mau Forest broods in resigned silence, close on the edges of fields fresh robbed of their ancient trees. I have a gallop where my father still trains his horses and where I can land my plane. Everything has been done — every material thing — to give this place the aspect of benignity, of friendship, of tolerance and conviviality, but the character of a dwelling, like that of a man, grows slowly.

  The walls of my house are without memories, or secrets, or laughter. Not enough of life has been breathed into them — their warmth is artificial; too few hands have turned the window latches, too few feet have trod the thresholds. The boards of the floor, self-conscious as youth or falsely proud as the newly rich, have not yet unlimbered enough to utter a single cordial creak. In time they will, but not for me.

  My father takes me by the arm and we desert the veranda and the sundown shadows advancing on the valley and go inside to the big room whose hearth of native stone is neither worn nor stained with ash. In these surroundings it will not be so hard to say good-bye as it once was at Njoro.

  My father leans against the mantelpiece and begins to load his pipe with tobacco whose aroma bestows a presence on thirty vanished years. That aroma and the smell of the smoke that follows it are to me the quintessence of memory.

  But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will, and my father knows it. He is sixty-four years old now, and well deserving of deep chairs and care and dottle dreams and carping cronies — should he desire these. He might say, with ample reason: ‘I’m old now. I’ve earned my rest.’

  But he doesn’t. He says: ‘You know, I like South Africa. I like Durban. I’m going down there to start training. The racing’s good and the stakes are high. I think it’s a good chance.’ He announces his intention with the sanguine expectancy of a schoolboy.

  ‘So, when you come back,’ he says, ‘I’ll be there.’

  He allows me no misgiving nor a moment’s remorse — not the luxury of feeling young nor himself the maudlin misery of feeling old.

  We sit together through the evening and discuss the things that each has saved for the other to hear. We talk of Pegasus — and of how he had died, quietly one night in his stall, for no reason that anyone could ever find.

  ‘Snake, perhaps,’ says my father. ‘Yellow mambas are deadly.’

  It may have been a mamba, or it may not have been. However, or whatever it was, Pegasus — so expectantly christened so long ago — is gone now, yielding his ethereal wings to the realization of wood and steel ones that fly as high and higher, but, for all that, are never so buoyant or capable of bearing quite such cargoes of hope.

  So we talked about that and about other things — about the forthcoming auction of my Avian, about Arab Ruta, and about Tom, who, with Charles Scott, had won the greatest air race ever staged — England to Australia — against the best pilots the world could muster.

  ‘How stra
nge it is,’ says my father, ‘that an old friend and neighbour of ours should have done such a wonderful thing! Eleven thousand miles and more — in seventy-one hours!’

  It seems wonderful, but not strange to me. There are men whose failures surprise nobody, and others whose successes are as easily anticipated — Tom was of these.

  I rise from my chair and my father glances at the clock. Time for bed. In the morning I will be off, but we have said nothing of good-bye. We have learned frugality — even in this.

  In the morning I get into my plane, peer down the length of the gallop I use for a runway, and wave to my father. I am smiling and he is smiling, and he waves too. I have just one more stop at Nairobi (for Blix), and the next overnight stop after that will be Juba, in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

  The plane rolls forward and I salute once more and leave my father standing on the earth he has stood upon so long and so steadily. I circle and dip my wings, or rather I think the Avian voluntarily makes her last curtsey — her last, at least, to him.

  He does not wave again. He stands, shading his eyes, looking upward, and I level off and take my course and follow it away.

  XX

  Kwaheri Means Farewell

  A MAP IN THE hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man’s faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader — even whose author, perhaps — must allow in his mind a recess for doubt.

  A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’

  And indeed you are. Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark become a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing.

  Yet, looking at it, feeling it, running a finger along its lines, it is a cold thing, a map, humourless and dull, born of calipers and a draughtsman’s board. That coastline there, that ragged scrawl of scarlet ink, shows neither sand nor sea nor rock; it speaks of no mariner, blundering full sail in wakeless seas, to bequeath, on sheepskin or a slab of wood, a priceless scribble to posterity. This brown blot that marks a mountain has, for the casual eye, no other significance, though twenty men, or ten, or only one, may have squandered life to climb it. Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert; and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet.

  Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope or sagas of conquest.

  No map I have flown by has ever been lost or thrown away; I have a trunk containing continents. I have the maps I always used en route to England and back. I have the log of my flight with Blix.

  It was not a record flight either in speed or endurance; we took the time we needed and avoided no necessary stops; but it was not a dull flight. Even in March of nineteen-thirty-six, toward the close of that ignoble bit of brigandage which Italian euphemists of the moment were calling the Conquest of Ethiopia, it was still less than commonplace to fly from Nairobi to London. There were airfields along the way, but the terrain between them — or much of it, at least — had the same remote quality, the same barely plausible appearance as the surface of the moon through lenses. It differed from the moon in that it was so ominously accessible, and was similar in that its aspect was equally forbidding.

  Flying due north, you had first to cross the entire Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the whole of Egypt, and the desert of Cyrenaica in Libya. You were then at Benghazi, and happy to be there indeed, but before you still lay the Gulf of Sidra, Tripolitania, Tunisia, and the Mediterranean Sea — and beyond that, France. No matter how blithely you undertook to span that sixty-five hundred miles, or how casually you referred to it as a trip to England, you were aware that it was, in fact, no trip at all, but a major voyage; you had to navigate, you had to be weather-wise, you had to consider the handicaps.

  Blix and I left at a pilot’s hour, but on no pilot’s day. Fog had spilled out of the sky by night and the morning found Nairobi and the Athi Plains bundled in mist. The town, the sunrise, and the ship were isolated each from the other by clouds that had no edges and refused to roll. They lay on the earth like sadness come to rest; they clung to people like burial clothes, white and premature. Blix found them gay.

  He arrived at the airport carrying no more luggage than would see a schoolboy through a week-end trip. His face was cherubic in the company of faces grim and grey as those carved in a Gothic arch. When all was ready, he climbed into the rear seat of the Leopard Moth and sat there whistling and nursing in his lap a long, cylindrical object, wrapped in paper, and which gurgled when it was moved.

  Arab Ruta went forward to swing the prop. I held my hand on the throttle and searched the fog with my eyes, but only from habit; I have never owned a carpet whose dimensions, imperfections, and limitations were more familiar to me than the surface of the Nairobi Airport. A lot of time had passed since the days of pig-holes, zebra herds, and oil flares. There were runways now, and hangars, and no audience to see the midnight landing of a plane or a dawn take-off; no Kikuyu youths to watch Ruta at his wonderful and mystic tasks. All was commonplace now. Adventure for Nairobi came in celluloid rolls straight from Hollywood, and adventure for other parts of the world went out from Nairobi in celluloid rolls straight from the cameras of professional jungle-trotters. It was a good time to leave.

  I nodded, and the propeller whirred to life. Arab Ruta sidestepped with agility born of long practice. I could not hear him say kwaheri, but I saw his lips make the word. I said it too, and felt the small flat gift he had slipped into the cabin a moment before.

  I have it still — a travelling clock bound in imitation leather, for which (I later learned) Ruta had hoarded five hundred of my cast-off cigarette coupons, collected quietly and patiently from wastebaskets, safari tents, and hangar sweepings.

  The clock keeps time; it rings when you set it. But what a sad substitute, that hysterical jingle, for the soft and soothing voice that used to say, just after dawn, ‘Your tea, Memsahib?’ or long before, ‘Lakwani, it is time to hunt!’

  Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.

  As we leave for London, swinging up to find the surface of the fog, and, finding it, the Leopard plays at her little game. The rudder bar resists the pressure of my feet, the stick inclines against my hand with almost truculent opposition. But this is momentary. A stern touch overcomes the urge to disobedience, and presently I settle back, flying with the craft and the craft with me.

  Blix is already settled. He is comfortably drowsing in our closed cabin, with his feet on the unused seat beside him. It makes little difference to him whether this is the start or the end of a flight. Morpheus has never been his master; Blix is the master of Morpheus. He calls Sleep when he wants it, and it comes. When he does not want it, it stays away, no matter how late the hour or how tiring the day has been.

  The first day is tiring enough, but only because the preparations for leaving have left me a bit weary. Night finds us at Juba, where my room in the Rest House, though it has the aspect of a prison cell, affords the fundamental comfort of a bed and protection from mosquitoes.

  At dawn I tumble out and see that Blix has left his own room and is pacing back and forth in front of the plane where she is picketed with ropes and stakes. Her fuselage is yellow and her wings silver. Again
st the barely lighted sky she looks less like a bird than like a rare and brilliant insect, dead, and preserved on a cardboard mat.

  We take off without breakfast because ahead of us lies country easier to face with ample time in reserve. Not that the crossing of it is a great aeronautical feat, but that to consider it indifferently might result in a sad aeronautical blunder.

  I do not know what the regulations are now, but at that time no woman was allowed to fly solo between Juba and Wadi Halfa without express permission from the Royal Air Force Headquarters at Khartoum.

  The reasons for this were plausible enough — a forced landing in the papyrus swamps of the Sudd was barely distinguishable from a forced landing on the banks of the Styx, and a forced landing beyond the Sudd, in the country of the Sudanese and Dinka tribes, might mean days or weeks of searching by the R.A.F., with the chances of recovering the cost of this being somewhat less hopeful than the chances of recovering the lost pilot.

  I am a little vague as to why it was thought that women were less capable than men of avoiding these obvious dangers, though I suspect there was more of gallantry than reason in the ruling. In all, I flew the entire route between Nairobi and London six times — four of them solo (after convincing the R.A.F. of my ability to do it), and other women have flown it too. The outstanding error of judgement in flying over the Sudd, as a matter of fact, was made by a man — the late Ernst Udet let himself run out of petrol while crossing it during the dry season and forced-landed on a ridge of hardened mud, where, after several anxious days, he was found by Tom Black, whose understanding of the Sudd was such that he was willing to spend days trying to get somebody out of it. Udet himself was hardly worse for the experience, but his mechanic was near death from mosquito bites.

  If you can vizualize twelve thousand square miles of swamp that seethes and crawls like a prehistoric crucible of half-formed life, you have a conception of the Sudd. It is an example of the less attractive by-products of the Nile River, and one place in this world worthy of the word ‘sinister.’ Add to that, ‘eerie’ and ‘treacherous,’ and any other similar adjectives that occur, and the conception may become clearer. The surface of the Sudd, from the air, is flat and green — and inviting. If you should be either hypnotized or forced into landing upon it (and if, miraculously, and impossibly, you didn’t turn over), the wheels of your plane would at once disappear into the muck, while your wings would, in all probability, rest upon the slowly heaving mat of decomposed — and living — growth that in many places is fifteen feet thick and under which flows a sluice of black water.