"West with the Night"

[fiefoe]

Beryl Markham had remarkable careers and wrote a remarkable book about them and creatures who call Africa home. She was captivating from the very start (where she confessed to be no weaver) till the very end (where she recounted her record-setting solo flight across the Atlantic.)

• HOW IS IT POSSIBLE to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start; there can be no other.’... After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance — re-visitation; and names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.
• There were roads, of course, leading in a dozen directions out of Nairobi. They started out boldly enough, but grew narrow and rough after a few miles and dwindled into the rock-studded hills, or lost themselves in a morass of red muram mud or black cotton soil, in the flat country and the valleys. On a map they look sturdy and incapable of deceit, but to have ventured from Nairobi south toward Machakos or Magadi in anything less formidable than a moderately powered John Deere tractor was optimistic to the point of sheer whimsey,
• To JUBA — KHARTOUM — CAIRO — I have never known whether this questionable encouragement to the casual traveller was only the result of well-meant wishful thinking or whether some official cursed with a depraved and sadistic humour had found an outlet for it after years of repression in a muggy Nairobi office.
• Beyond are villages still sleeping in the forests, on the great reservations — villages peopled with human beings only vaguely aware that the even course of their racial life may somehow be endangered by the persistent and irresistible pressure of the White man. <> But white men’s wars are fought on the edges of Africa — you can carry a machine gun three hundred miles inland from the sea and you are still on the edge of it.
• Competitors in conquest have overlooked the vital soul of Africa herself, from which emanates the true resistance to conquest. The soul is not dead, but silent, the wisdom not lacking, but of such simplicity as to be counted non-existent in the tinker’s mind of modern civilization.  Africa is of an ancient age and the blood of many of her peoples is as venerable and as chaste as truth. What upstart race, sprung from some recent, callow century to arm itself with steel and boastfulness, can match in purity the blood of a single Masai Murani whose heritage may have stemmed not far from Eden?
• From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training race-horses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there a year.
• to fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely. It is at times unreal to the point of where the existence of other people seems not even a reasonable probability. The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more your planet than is a distant star — if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant.
• It is still the host of all my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries always intriguing, but never wholly solved. It is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water and the yellow warmth of bright mornings. It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts. It is without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races.
• So I am off to Nungwe — a silly word, a silly place. A place of small hopes and small successes, buried like the inconsequential treasure of an imaginative miser, out of bounds and out of most men’s wanting
• Arab Ruta is a Nandi, anthropologically a member of a Nilotic tribe, humanly a member of a smaller tribe, a more elect tribe, the tribe composed of those too few, precisely sensitive, but altogether indomitable individuals contributed sparingly by each race, exclusively by none. <> He is of the tribe that observes with equal respect the soft voice and the hardened hand, the fullness of a flower, the quick finality of death. His is the laughter of a free man happy at his work, a strong man with lust for living.
• In the daytime she is a small gay complement to the airy blue of the sky, like a bright fish under the surface of a clear sea. In darkness such as this she is no more than a passing murmur, a soft, incongruous murmur above the earth... To me she is alive and to me she speaks. I feel through the soles of my feet on the rudder-bar the willing strain and flex of her muscles. The resonant, guttural voice of her exhausts has a timbre more articulate than wood and steel, more vibrant than wires and sparks and pounding pistons. <> She speaks to me now, saying the wind is right, the night is fair, the effort asked of her well within her powers.
• The sight of the jackal had brought to mind the scarcely comforting speculation that in Africa there is never any waste. Death particularly is never wasted. What the lion leaves, the hyena feasts upon and what craps remain are morsels for the jackal, the vulture, or even the consuming sun.
• Wherever you are, it seems, you must have news of some other place, some bigger place, so that a man on his deathbed in the swamplands of Victoria Nyanza is more interested in what has lately happened in this life than in what may happen in the next. It is really this that makes death so hard — curiosity unsatisfied. <> But if contempt for death is correctly interpreted as courage, then Ebert’s dying friend was a courageous man.
• There never seems to be any reason for filth, but there are occasions, like this one, where it would be hard to find a reason for cleanliness. ‘Poverty,’ an old proverb says, ‘is not a disgrace, but a great swinishness.’
• and there was the bedraggled windsock, with its toe still sealed shut, hanging from its mast like the pathetic flag of a domain so small that nobody could ever take it seriously.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.’
• 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.
• 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.
• 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
• ‘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.
• The sound of Paddy’s roar in my ears will only be duplicated, I think, when the doors of hell slip their wobbly hinges, one day, and give voice and authenticity to the whole panorama of Dante’s poetic nightmares. It was an immense roar that encompassed the world and dissolved me into it.
• Jim Elkington, even without a rawhide whip, was very impressive. He was one of those enormous men whose girths alone seem to preclude any possibility of normal movement, much less of speed. But Jim had speed — not to be loosely compared with lightning, but rather like the cannon balls of the Napoleonic Wars.
• I believe the Bwana considered in his mind that it would be the best thing not to beat the lion just then, but the Bwana when he runs very fast is like the trunk of a great baobob tree rolling down a slope, and it seems that because of this it was not possible for him to explain the thought of his mind to the soles of his feet in a sufficient quickness of time to prevent him from rushing much closer to the lion than in his heart he wished to be. <> ‘And it was this circumstance, as I am telling it,’ said Bishon Singh, ‘which in my considered opinion made it possible for you to be alive, Beru.’
• The posts were there, and the wire too, but rhino take sensual and sadistic pleasure in scratching their great hulks against telegraph posts, and any baboon worthy of his salt cannot resist swinging from suspended wires. Often a herd of giraffe found it expedient to cross the railroad tracks, but would not condescend to bow to the elevated metal strands that proclaimed the White Man’s mandate over their feeding grounds. As a result, many telegrams en route from Mombasa to Kisumu, or the other way around, were intercepted, their cryptic dots and dashes frozen in a festoon of golden wire dangling from one or another of the longest necks in Africa.
• Buller weighed something over sixty-five pounds and most of it was nicely coordinated offensive equipment.
• No animal, however fast, has greater speed than a charging lion over a distance of a few yards. It is a speed faster than thought — faster always than escape.
• I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains — the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home, and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence. Even his weapons are plebeian — curved tusks, sharp, deadly, but not beautiful, used inelegantly for rooting as well as for fighting.
• It was not always easy to get so limited an article as paper in East Africa at that time, but when we had it, it always worked. I haven’t any idea of why it worked. Poking a stick through the hole never did, nor shouting into it, nor even using smoke. To the warthog, I think, the paper made a sound that was clearly insulting — comparable perhaps to what is known here and there nowadays as a Bronx cheer.
• The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening,
• A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. So, by nineteen-fifteen, the lights had not only gone out ‘all over Europe,’ but many of what few windows there were had begun darkening in East Africa.
• ‘The Chameleon began to talk, but he could not. In the excitement of trying to deliver his tidings of eternal life, before the Egret could speak, the Chameleon could only stutter and change, stupidly, from one colour to another. So the Egret, in a calm voice, gave the message of Death. <> ‘Since then,’ said Kibii, ‘all men have died. Our people know this fact.’
• A lovely horse is always an experience to him. It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words. He has always talked about horses, but he has never unravelled his love of them in a skein of commonplace adjectives.
• It is a simple memory made only of colours and shapes, of heat and trudging people and broad-leaved trees that looked cooler than they were. All the country I know is this country — these hills, familiar as an old wish, this veldt, this forest.
• SOMEBODY WITH A FLAIR for small cynicism once said, ‘We live and do not learn.’ But I have learned some things. <> I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep — leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead.
• It all happened because those amiable gods who most times walked together, or at least agreed on larger things, fell out and neglected to send any rain. <> What does a fall of rain, a single fall of rain, mean in anybody’s life? What does it matter if this month there is none, if the sky is as clear as the song of a boy, and the sun shines and people walk in it and the world is yellow with it? What does a week matter, and who is so dour as to welcome a storm?
• A country laved with icy streams, its valleys choked with bracken, its hills clothed in the green heather that wandered Scotsmen sing about, seems hardly Africa. Not a stone has a familiar cast; the sky and the earth meet like strangers, and the touch of the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.
• THE TREES THAT GUARD the thatched hut where I live stand in disorganized ranks, a regiment at ease, and lay their shadows on the ground like lances carried too long.
• What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.
• ‘When you fly,’ the young man said, ‘you get a feeling of possession that you couldn’t have if you owned all of Africa. You feel that everything you see belongs to you — all the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours; not that you want it, but because, when you’re alone in a plane, there’s no one to share it. It’s there and it’s yours. It makes you feel bigger than you are — closer to being something you’ve sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to seriously imagine.’
• All these were diversions. If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.
• Nervously, his owner had listened to the argument that a girl of eighteen could not be entrusted with those precise finishing touches, that careful shading of muscle against bone, that almost sophistical task of persuading a horse that nothing in his own world of probabilities was so improbable as another horse’s ability to beat him past the post.
• It was a world of absolutes. It held no intermediate shades, neither of sound nor of colour. There were no subtle strokes in the creation of Nakuru. <> The shores of its lake are rich in silence, lonely with it, but the monotonous flats of sand and mud that circle the shallow water are relieved of dullness, not by only an occasional bird or a flock of birds or by a hundred birds; as long as the day lasts Nakuru is no lake at all, but a crucible of pink and crimson fire — each of its flames, its million flames, struck from the wings of a flamingo. Ten thousand birds of such exorbitant hue, caught in the scope of an eye, is a sight that loses credence in one’s own mind years afterward. But ten thousand flamingos on Lake Nakuru would be a number startling in its insignificance, and a hundred thousand would barely begin the count.
• He is a grand horseman, honest as daylight.
• How can I compare a race like this to music? Or how can I not? Will some perfectionist snug in the arms of his chair under the marble eyes of Beethoven shudder at the thought? I suppose so, but if there’s a fledgling juggler of notes and cadences, less loyal to the stolid past, who seeks a new theme for at least a rhapsody, he may buy a ticket at any gate and see how they run. He will do what I cannot. He will transpose and change and re-create the sound of hooves that pelt like rain, or come like a rolling storm, or taper like the rataplan of fading tympani. He will find instruments to fit the bellow of a crowd and notes to voice its silence; he will find rhythm in disorder, and build a crescendo from a sigh. He will find a place for heroic measures if he watches well, and build his climax to a wild beat and weave the music of excitement in his overtones.
• I see her transformed from the shadow she was to a small, swift flame of valour that throws my doubt in my teeth. I see her scorn the threat of Wrack and cram the cheers for his supporters back in their throats. I see her sweep the final furlong on swollen legs, forging ahead, feeding him the dust of her hooves.
• This was a new thing. The rest of the world may have grown complacent by then about aeroplanes flying in the night, but our world had barren skies. Ours was a young world, eager for gifts — and this was one.
• the new romance of a roaring propeller — a sound that was, for me, like a white light prying through closed eyes, disturbing slumber I did not want disturbed. It was the slumber of contentment — contentment with a rudimentary, a worn scheme of life — slumber long nurtured by a broad and silent country, effortless and fruitful in the sun, and whose own dreams were the fabric of its history. I had curiosity, but there was resentment with it. And neither of these could be translated into reason.
• (Tom Black:) He shrugged, looking at me out of eyes that, for the first time, I saw were disturbing in their clarity. They were blue and they seemed to dissolve all questions and all answers within themselves. And they laughed when they should have been solemn. They were eyes that might have followed the trajectory of a dead cat through a chapel window with more amusement than horror, but might at the same time have expressed sympathy for the fate of the cat.
• The third white man who had accompanied the abortive safari had nothing to say; there couldn’t have been much. <> It was a tragedy with too petty a plot to encourage talk, too little irony to invite reflection. It was a scene whose grand climax consisted of the scooping of a few miserable ashes into a bent and unsanctified biscuit tin, and whose final curtain, wove from ribbons of dusk and a few thin threads of smoke, rolled down upon a shiny aeroplane straining toward the sky.
• 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.
• 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,
• 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.
• he open hangar looked out on the airfield, on the plains, and on a square of sky lonely for clouds.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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
• 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
• 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.
• A herd of elephant, as seen from a plane, has a quality of an hallucination. The proportions are wrong — they are like those of a child’s drawing of a field mouse in which the whole landscape, complete with barns and windmills, is dwarfed beneath the whiskers of the mighty rodent who looks both able and willing to devour everything, including the thumb-tack that holds the work against the schoolroom wall. <> Peering down from the cockpit at grazing elephant, you have the feeling that what you are beholding is wonderful, but not authentic. It is not only incongruous in the sense that animals simply are not as big as trees, but also in the sense that the twentieth century, tidy and svelte with stainless steel as it is, would not possibly permit such prehistoric monsters to wander in its garden.
• The ability to move soundlessly through a wall of bush as tightly woven as Nature can weave it is not an art that can be acquired much after childhood. I cannot explain it, nor could Arab Maina who taught me ever explain it. It is not a matter of watching where you step; it is rather a matter of keeping your eyes on the place where you want to be, while every nerve becomes another eye, every muscle develops reflex action. You do not guide your body, you trust it to be silent.
• I have rarely seen anything so calm as that bull elephant — or so casually determined upon destruction. It might be said that he shuffled to the kill. Being, like all elephant, almost blind, this one could not see us, but he was used to that. He would follow scent and sound until he could see us, which, I computed would take about thirty seconds.
• I was looking into our elephant’s mouth with a kind of idiotic curiosity when he screamed again — and thereby, I am convinced, saved both Blix and me from a fate no more tragic than simple death, but infinitely less tidy. <> The scream of that elephant was a strategic blunder, and it did him out of a wonderful bit of fun. It was such an authentic scream, of such splendid resonance, that his cronies, still grazing in the bush, accepted it as legitimate warning, and left. We had known they were still there because the bowels of peacefully occupied elephant rumble continually like oncoming thunder — and we had heard thunder.
• ‘There’s an old adage,’ he said, ‘translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages — “Life is life and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet when the goldfish die.” ’
• I had never realized before how quickly men deteriorate without razors and clean shirts. They are like potted plants that go to weed unless they are pruned and tended daily. A single day’s growth of beard makes a man look careless; two days’, derelict; and four days’, polluted.
• Some of the growth must have been fifteen feet high, and all of it so dense that a man could barely force his body through it. I suppose that more than a thousand small trees, with trunks three to five inches in diameter, had been felled with those ordinary bush knives. Once the trees had fallen, their stumps had to be dug out of the earth and thrown to the side and an effort made to level the cleared ground. <> I learned later from Makula — who had diplomatically remained aloof from the labour controversy (as well as from the labour itself) — that for two nights running Blix had slipped out of his blankets when everyone else was presumably asleep and had worked straight into the morning on the clearing.
• Get Farah to give you all the beans and dry food you can carry for the porters, and bring it here after you’ve dropped Winston. It means two more landings in this hole and three take-offs. But if I didn’t think you could manage, I wouldn’t ask you to do it.’
  ‘I suppose if I ask what happens if I don’t manage, you’ll tell me how quiet it gets when the goldfish die?’
  Blix grinned. ‘Terribly quiet,’ he said, ‘but so peaceful.’
• I remembered an old Swahili phrase, and I said it: ‘A wise man is not more than a woman — unless he is also brave.’
• 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.
• 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.
• Our silence was not an awed silence; I think we were simply depressed beyond words with the business of hanging for so long a time under such a flat blue sky and above such a flat virescent swamp. It was hardly like flying. It was like sitting in a plane which, by the aid of wires, dangled equidistant between the floor and the ceiling of a stage-set conceived without benefit of imagination.
• the desert for almost three thousand miles, nor are the towns and cities that live in it successful in gainsaying its emptiness. To me, desert has the quality of darkness; none of the shapes you see in it are real or permanent. Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless, and infinite. Like night it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost.
• The symbols of war — impressive desert forts, shiny planes, beetle-browed warships — all inspire the sons of Rome, if not to gallantry, then at least to histrionics, which, in the Italian mind, are synonymous anyway. I sometimes think it must be extremely difficult for the Italian people to remain patient in the face of their armies’ unwavering record of defeat (they looked so resplendent on parade). But there is little complaint. <> The answer must be that the country of Caruso has lived a symbolic life for so long that the token has become indistinguishable from the fact or the deed. If an aria can suffice for a fighting heart, a riband draped on any chest can suffice for a general — and the theory of victory, for victory itself.
• It is a small city with a soul — a grubby soul, perhaps, but cities with souls seldom die. <> Like all seaports of the East, Benghazi is blatant and raw; it is weary and it is wise. Once it lived on ivory brought by caravan across the desert, trading this treasure and ostrich feathers and lesser things to an appreciative world, but now it deals in duller stuff
• Today Africa may seem to be that ever-promised land, almost achieved; but tomorrow it may be a dark land again, drawn into itself, contemptuous, and impatient with the futility of eager men who have scrambled over it since the experiment of Eden. In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires — rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.
• At five thousand feet it was still dark, and at seven and at eight. I began to think it would never be otherwise, but the Leopard was true to her name; she clawed her way up the steep bank of the storm until at ten thousand she found its crest. She found a sky so blue and so still that it seemed the impact of a wing might splinter it, and we slid across a surface of white clouds as if the plane were a sleigh running on fresh-fallen snow.
• My hands had been taught to seek the controls of a plane. Usage had taught them. They were at ease clinging to a stick, as a cobbler’s fingers are in repose grasping an awl. No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things — the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold — were false to you.
• ‘If you open one,’ said Percival, ‘without shutting the other first, you may get an airlock. You know the tanks in the cabin have no gauges, so it may be best to let one run completely dry before opening the next. Your motor might go dead in the interval — but she’ll start again. She’s a De Havilland Gipsy — and Gipsys never stop.’
• Tom had grown older too; he had jettisoned a deadweight of irrelevant hopes and wonders, and had left himself a realistic code that had no room for temporizing or easy sentiment.
• Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind — such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.
• England, Wales, and the Irish Sea are behind me like so much time used up. On a long flight distance and time are the same. But there had been a moment when Time stopped — and Distance too. It was the moment I lifted the blue-and-silver Gull from the aerodrome, the moment the photographers aimed their cameras, the moment I felt the craft refuse its burden and strain toward the earth in sullen rebellion, only to listen at last to the persuasion of stick and elevators, the dogmatic argument of blueprints that said she had to fly because the figures proved it.
• I suppose that the denial of natural impulse is what is meant by ‘keeping calm,’ but impulse has reason in it. If it is night and you are sitting in an aeroplane with a stalled motor, and there are two thousand feet between you and the sea, nothing can be more reasonable than the impulse to pull back your stick in the hope of adding to that two thousand, if only by a little. The thought, the knowledge, the law that tells you that your hope lies not in this, but in a contrary act — the act of directing your impotent craft toward the water — seems a terrifying abandonment, not only of reason, but of sanity. Your mind and your heart reject it. It is your hands — your stranger’s bands — that follow with unfeeling precision the letter of the law.
• It is impossible to avoid the thought that this is the end of my flight, but my reactions are not orthodox; the various incidents of my entire life do not run through my mind like a motion-picture film gone mad. I only feel that all this has happened before — and it has. It has all happened a hundred times in my mind, in my sleep, so that now I am not really caught in terror; I recognize a familiar scene, a familiar story with its climax dulled by too much telling. <> I do not know how close to the waves I am when the motor explodes to life again. But the sound is almost meaningless. I see my hand easing back on the stick, and I feel the Gull climb up into the storm, and I see the altimeter whirl like a spindle again, paying out the distance between myself and the sea.