West With the Night

by Beryl Markham

  ‘Come on, Wrack!’

  A diehard, eh? All right, roar again — howl again, but bet again if you can!

  The filly streaks past the colt like a dust devil past a stone, like a cheetah past a hound. Poor Wrack. It will break his heart.

  But it doesn’t — not Wrack’s heart! His head is up a little and I know he’s giving all he has, but he gives more. He’s a stallion, and the male ego kindles a courage that smothers the pain of his burning muscles. He forgets himself, his jockey, everything but his goal. He lowers his head and thunders after the filly.

  Without seeing, I know that Eric gives me a quick glance, but I cannot return it. I can only watch the battle. I am not yet so callous that the gallantry of Wrack seems less than magnificent.

  Gallop, Wrack! — faster than you can, harder than you can. My own Wrack — my stubborn Wrack — six lengths behind.

  But for how long? Wise Child’s still against the rails — a small shadow against the rails, moving like a shadow, swift as a shadow — determined, quiet, steady. My glasses are on her. Thousands of eyes are on her when she sways.

  She sways, and the groan from the crowd absorbs my own.

  The filly swings from the rails and falters. Her legs are going, her speed is going, her race is going!

  Wrack’s jockey sees it. Wrack sees it. The whip smarts against his quarters, but he needs no whip. He closes fast, narrowing the distance — length by length.

  ‘Come on, Wrack!’ The cry is almost barbaric now, and it comes from a hundred places.

  Scream — yell! Cheer him on! Can’t you see her legs are going? Can’t you see she’s running only on her heart? Let him have the race — let him win. Don’t push her, Sonny. Don’t touch her, Sonny …

  ‘Eric …’

  But he’s gone. He’s jumped over the box and run down to the rails. For myself, I can’t move. I exist in a cauldron of screams and cheers and waving arms. Wrack and the filly are down the last stretch now, and he’s on her flank, overtaking her, passing her, shaming her — while she breaks.

  My glasses dangle on their strap. I bend over the edge of the box, clamping my fingers on the wooden ledge. I can’t shout, or think. I know this is only a horse-race. I know that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday, whoever loses. I know the world won’t turn a hair, whoever wins — but it seems so hard to believe.

  I suppose for an instant I’m in a trance. My eyes see everything, but register nothing. Not a noise, but the sudden hush of the crowd jars me to consciousness again. How long is an instant? Could it be long enough for this?

  I see it happen — clearly, sharply, as a camera must see things happen. I am as cold and as bloodless. As rigid too, I think.

  I see Wise Child falter once more, and then straighten. 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.

  And I hear the crowd find its voice again, hurling her past the winning post in a towering roar of tribute.

  And then it’s over. Then it’s silent, as if somebody closed the door on Babel.

  I feel my way down to the unsaddling enclosure. A grey mass of people clings to the rails — a foggy, but articulate jungle of arms, heads, and shoulders surrounding the winner — chanting, mumbling, shifting. They stare, but I think they see nothing. They see only a bay filly, standing quietly with quiet eyes — and that is nothing. That is ordinary; it can be seen anywhere — a bay filly that won a race.

  The crowd dwindles as I talk to Eric, to Sonny, to Arab Ruta, and stroke the still sweating neck of Wise Child. The movement of my hand is mechanical, almost senseless.

  ‘She didn’t just win,’ Eric says; ‘she broke the Leger record.’

  I nod without saying anything and Eric looks at me with kindly impatience.

  Weighing out of the jockeys is finished; everything is over and the last notes of the band have whimpered into silence. All the people press toward the gates, the emblems of their holiday litter the course, or scamper in a listless dance before the wind. Half the grandstand lies in a shadow, and the other half is lit with the sun. It is like a pod emptied of its seeds. Eric takes me by the arm and we jostle toward the exit with the rest.

  ‘She broke the record — and with those legs!’ says Eric.

  ‘I know. You told me.’

  ‘So I did.’ He walks along, scuffing the ground, and scratches his chin in a masculine effort not to look sentimental — a futile effort, but at least he can inject a note of gruffness into his voice.

  ‘Maybe it’s silly,’ he says, ‘but I know you’ll agree that no matter how much money we could make with Wise Child, she deserves never to race again.’

  And she never does.

  XIV

  Errands of the Wind

  THE DOORYARD OF NAIROBI falls into the Athi Plains. One night I stood there and watched an aeroplane invade the stronghold of the stars. It flew high; it blotted some of them out; it trembled their flames like a hand swept over a company of candles.

  The drumming of the engines was as far away as the drumming of a tom-tom. Unlike a tom-tom, it changed its sound; it came closer until it filled the sky with a boastful song.

  There were pig-holes and it was dark. There were a thousand animals strolling in the path of an aeroplane searching for a haven; they were like logs in a lightless harbour.

  But the intruder circled and swung low with articulate urgency. Time after time it circled and swung low, and its voice said: I know where I am. Let me land.

  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.

  I think there were four of us standing there, staring upward, watching the rigid shadow wheel and return again. We lighted fires and made flares. The flames of these burned holes in the darkness, and when they were at their highest, the plane came down but could not land.

  Wildebeest and zebra detached themselves from their restive herds, like volunteers in a People’s Army, and moved under the dipping wings.

  The plane swung low again and climbed again, blaring its frustration. But it returned with vindictive fury and shattered the front of the animal legions and made first conquest of their ancient sanctuary.

  More people had driven out from the town, compelled by 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.

  A dozen hands went out to help the pilot from his monoplane — a mechanical hybrid with high wings and a body the commonest jay would have jeered at. Two motorcars, manoeuvred into position, provided a somewhat less than celestial aura as an accessory to the visitation, and the pilot descended into this — unshaven, unsmiling, and apparently long unwashed.

  With one hand he waved away the questions that greeted him; with the other he clutched an ordinary biscuit tin — a bedraggled, a spurious Galahad nursing a fraudulent grail.

  I moved closer and stared into his face. One side was lit by an oil flare and the other by the beam of a car. Even so, the stubbornly confident features were recognizable. When I had seen him last, the hand that held the biscuit tin had brandished a pair of pliers, and his chariot, a more earthy thing than this one, had no more exalted aspiration than to travel a dirt-track road at Molo with respectable speed.

  The happy tinker had got his aeroplane. But either the thrill of having it had already dulle
d or he had accepted what seemed to me a major triumph as anyone else might accept the tedious dependability of daybreak.

  He nodded to the half-dozen of us grouped around him, yawned as if he had never yawned before, and asked for two things — a cigarette and an ambulance.

  ‘There’s a wounded man in the cabin … could somebody drive to the hospital?’

  A car left at once, the whine of its gears rising to the pitch of heroic hysteria, and people stepped back from the plane as if Death had crooked a finger from its cockpit.

  Still holding his biscuit tin, Tom Black, late of Molo, of Eldama Ravine, and of other places whose names I had not the temerity to ask, ministered to the needs of his machine, puffed at his cigarette and maintained a thoughtful silence. It was a preoccupied silence that no one attempted to disturb.

  When the ambulance came, the injured passenger, sheathed in a cocoon of blankets, was handed out of the cabin. Still more onlookers arrived, the animals, conceding armistice, but not peace, had returned in cautious groups, their eyes burning like lanterns in a poorly lighted dream.

  Even the flares persisted — hopeful yet of staring down the night. But the night had begun to grumble. There was thunder, and the stars took cover.

  The wounded man was borne in silence, while wildebeest, ostrich, and zebra circled the ceremony, unholy hyenas whimpered their frustration, and the visionary whose visions came true directed the disposition of the semi-rigid bundle, like a priest of Baal offering a sacrifice.

  An hour later, in commemoration, I suppose, of our first meeting, Tom Black and I sat at the only all-night coffee stand in Nairobi, and I yielded to curiosity; I asked questions.

  Something about that irreverent contrivance of fabric and wires and noise, blustering through the chaste arena of the night, had stirred the course of my thoughts to restless eddies.

  Where had he been? Why had he come?

  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.

  ‘I flew the plane down from London,’ he explained, ‘and landed at Kisumu. That was yesterday. Before I could take off again for Nairobi, a runner came with a message from a safari near Musoma. Same old thing — somebody proving how fatal it is to be a fool. Lion, rifles — and stupidity. You can imagine the rest.’

  I could, almost, but I preferred to listen. I looked around the little coffee stand where we sat. A corporal of the K.A.R. and an Indian clerk stood at the counter, yards apart, eating solemnly as if each were to be hanged at dawn. But there was no one else. We four were the only acolytes at the shabby midnight altar — we four and its silent mullah who moved among the pots and dishes, clothed in a vestment of tarnished white.

  Through my own insistence, fortified by coffee transparent as tea, I got the details of what I suppose was hardly more than an incident, but which somehow proved that Africa is capable of a sardonic smile, that it accepts new things, but allows no thing to escape its baptism.

  Tom Black had flown six thousand miles with a new aeroplane and a new idea. His dream had sprouted wings and wheels. It had an authentic voice that he hoped would wake other dreamers, and silence the sleepy sounds, of a roused but still too lazy land.

  If the towns and villages of Kenya lacked roads to unite them, like threads in a net, then at least there was land enough for the wheels of planes and sky enough for their wings and time enough for their propellers to beat back the barriers of doubt they flew against. Everywhere in the world, highways had come first — and then the landing fields. Only not here, for much of Kenya’s future was already the past of other places. New things that shone with the ingenuity of modern times were superimposed upon an old order, contrasting against it like a chromium clock against a rawhide shield. The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent.

  Into this horizon Tom Black had flown his aeroplane. One day it would carry mail, as he intended it to do. It would soar above old paths tamped by the feet of Native runners; it would cleave wakes in the wind.

  But first, in homage to its ancient host, it had already performed an errand; it had carried a message of enterprise, a cargo of pain, and a vessel of death through an African night.

  ‘Lion, rifles — and stupidity’ — a simple story as he told it, and as it was.

  None of the characters in it were distinguished ones — not even the lion.

  He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.

  The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him with-out killing him, and then turned the unconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.

  When Tom Black, sacrificing a triumphant arrival at Nairobi, landed instead at the camp site near Musoma, one man lay dead and a second, mangled and helpless, was alive only by the caprice of chance. A third white man and a couple of Native boys stood about the burdened canvas cot performing feeble incantations and attempting sorcery against gangrene with bandage, iodine, and water. The camera was a ruined mass of glass and metal, the lion was dead, though some kind of elemental retribution had armed him with strength for the last blow. There was a human corpse to be disposed of and a life to be saved — if that were possible.

  Messages were sent by runner and by telegraph from Kisumu. And messages were received. The dead man, it was requested, was to be cremated and his ashes brought to Nairobi.

  Cremation is a smooth word that seeks to conceal the indelicate reality of a human body being baked in fire. In print and in the advertisements of mortuaries equipped with silver-handled kilns, it is a successful word. In mid-afternoon on the African veldt under a harsh and revealing sun, it is at best a euphemism. Still, since men cherish the paradox requiring that to insure immortality they must preserve what is most mortal about them, wood was gathered and a fire was built.

  The wounded man, wrapped in his bandages and his pain, could smell at intervals the heavily significant smudge of the embers. The Natives vanished.

  Tom Black, who liked Life too much to be patient with Death, squatted on his heels through the long afternoon, solaced by an occasional jigger of tepid whisky, while a pencil of smoke rising from the pyre wrote endlessly its dismal little tale in disturbing and legible script.

  If there were vultures — those false but democratic mourners at every casual bier — they were not mentioned in his recounting. There were no tears, no fumbling over a prayer book. 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.

  The injured man lived to tell (but I think not to boast) about his encounter with the lion, and the ashes of his companion repose now, I suspect, in an urn of Grecian elegance far from any path a creature more ominous than a mouse might choose to wander. Perhaps above that urn there hangs a picture salvaged from the broken camera — a picture of a great beast frozen forever in an attitude of bewildered agony by the magic of a lens. And, if this is so, then those who pause before these otherwise unmeaning trifles may consider that they speak a moral — not profound, but worthy of a thought; Death will have his moment of respect, however he comes along, and no matter upon what
living thing he lays his hand.

  African tragedy — melancholy trivia. What’s in a point of view?

  Tom Black sipped his coffee, stared into the cup as if it were a crystal ball, and grinned at his own story.

  ‘There’s a technique about distinguishing one kind of ash from another,’ he said, ‘known only to myself and the early Egyptians. So don’t ask questions. Just remember never to fly without a match or a biscuit tin. And of course you’re going to fly. I’ve always known it. I could see it in the stars.’

  ‘Ruta,’ I said, ‘I think I am going to leave all this and learn to fly.’

  He stood in a loose-box beside a freshly groomed colt — a young colt gleaming like light on water. There was a body-brush in Ruta’s hand, its bristles intertwined with hairs from the colt. Ruta removed the hairs with slow fingers and hung the brush on a peg. He looked out the stable door into the near distance where Menegai shouldered a weightless cloud. He shrugged and dusted dustless hands, one against the other.

  He said, ‘If it is to be that we must fly, Memsahib, then we will fly. At what hour of the morning do we begin?’

  BOOK FOUR

  XV

  Birth of a Life

  WE BEGAN AT THE first hour of the morning. We began when the sky was clean and ready for the sun and you could see your breath and smell traces of the night. We began every morning at that same hour, using what we were pleased to call the Nairobi Aerodrome, climbing away from it with derisive clamour, while the burghers of the town twitched in their beds and dreamed perhaps of all unpleasant things that drone — of wings and stings, and corridors in Bedlam.

  Tom taught me in a D. H. Gipsy Moth, at first, and her propeller beat the sunrise silence of the Athi Plains to shreds and scraps. We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it. These I learned at once. But most things came harder.