Perhaps, when we took off from the Tunis Airport, I should have circled once or twice and dipped my wings in salute, because I knew that, while Africa would be there forever, it would not ever be there quite as I remembered it nor as Blix remembered it.
Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless. It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradled not only cities, but civilizations — and seen them die, and seen new ones born again — Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.
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.
Imperious Carthage must once have looked upon Africa as its own province, its future empire; and the sons of the Romans who destroyed that hope, and are today no longer Romans, have retreated with a step rather less firm than Caesar’s over routes that knew the rumble of cavalry long before Christ.
All nations lay claim to Africa, but none has wholly possessed her yet. In time she will be taken, yielding neither to Nazi nor to Fascist conquest, but to integrity equal to her own and to wisdom capable of understanding her wisdom and of discerning between wealth and fulfilment. Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice. Barbarism, however bright its trappings, is still alien to her heart.
‘We’ll be back,’ said Blix. And of course we would be, but, as we flew out over the Mediterranean toward the island of Sardinia with the coast of Tunisia still under our wings, there was no sign that Africa was aware that we were leaving, or cared. All things return to her — even such trivial things.
We found Sardinia — and Cagliari, its citadel that housed the last battalion of Fascist army officials we should have to face. But, after detaining us two more days, first, on the suspicion that I was not a woman, but a man in disguise, and secondly, on the inspired conjecture that, because our passports were stamped with old Ethiopian visas, we must both be spies (hardly clever ones either), our inquisitors had finally to set us free.
Their reluctance to do this was almost touching. Here again were officers and men of ‘the best-dressed army in the world,’ champing at the bit, fretting for weeks at a time before the arrival of a foreign plane afforded them the opportunity of surrounding its passengers and holding them captive beyond the sights of a battery of snub-nosed rubber stamps. We left Cagliari after computing that the Italian military had altogether detained us for ten extra days in the course of a six-thousand-mile flight that should have taken us less than a week.
Between Cagliari and Cannes, we flew into the first really dangerous weather of the voyage. What had been a blue sky became a ferment of clouds that clotted before a driving wind and blacked out our vision with curtains of rain.
The Leopard Moth undertook the challenge with confident gallantry, but when wind velocity reached sixty miles an hour while we were still over Sardinia, and I was hedge-hopping with the vague knowledge that the sea was somewhere ahead and the specific knowledge that the island had only one airport — the one behind us — it began to seem quite likely that the French coast was more remote than it had been when we left Nairobi.
I turned and smiled at Blix and he smiled back with equal mirth — which is to say, none; and I realized how much more difficult it is for a passenger than for a pilot to hang on to his nerve in weather like that. Blix particularly was used to depending upon his own resources and his own two good hands in any situation, but there he sat, useless as so much luggage and quite as helpless, knowing at the same time that we had no radio nor any special instruments to guide us to our goal.
A forced landing was impossible; the attempt would have resulted in what insurance companies so tenderly refer to as ‘a complete write-off,’ and at our backs the storm had already closed like a trap. We approached the sea with the plane flying crabwise. I held her nose on the course, judging her drift at twenty degrees. She was like a scrap of trash caught in a gale, and I experienced that sense of futility all pilots must sometimes feel when the natural forces that rule this planet reassert their sovereignty (and express their contempt) for Man the Pretender.
Flying at an altitude of a hundred feet, we saw the land break away to the sea, and saw the sea snatch at the wind with white, frustrated hands. The blue Mediterranean was not the Mediterranean of the travel books; it was the sea of Ulysses, with the escaped charges of Æolus running wild upon it. All the winds had burst their fetters.
‘No chance to land now,’ said Blix.
I shook my head. ‘There hasn’t been a chance since we hit the storm. We can’t stay down, so we’ll have to go up.’
I gauged my drift again as carefully as I could, reset my course for Cannes, and began to climb. We gained altitude, foot by foot, but it was not like flying — it was like running a gamut of unseen enemies, their blows falling, even in the dark, with unerring precision, and the plane groaned under each.
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. The light was blinding — like light that in summer fills an Arctic scene and is in fact its major element.
I turned to Blix, but he had fallen asleep with the confidence of a child that in a world so bright there could lurk no evil.
For my part, I could not be sure that my drift calculations had been accurate. ‘Ceiling zero’ is a self-explanatory phrase that everybody understands, but the nomenclature of flying has always needed an equally terse description for complete lack of visibility below. ‘Floor zero’ seems hardly a happy solution, but I submit it for want of a better, and with equal generosity I suggest that ‘cloud-hopping’ may indicate the predicament of a pilot searching for a hole through which to descend and attain the earth again without blindly crashing into a part of it.
There were no holes in the white and endless prairie we sledded upon. It was an infinite prairie built of mist turned ice, and the shining light and the smoothness, and the stillness of the air made it appear neither probable nor desirable that down below, or anywhere, there should be another world. It was easy to believe and almost to wish that there wasn’t, but indulgence in such feeble metaphysics was not wisdom; if we were off our course, even by a few degrees, we should land either on the coast of Spain or on the coast of Italy — and then there was always the sea.
I was about to check my instruments again — out of habit, because there was little they could tell me now without a fixed point against which to reset my compass — when the Leopard was so violently shaken that Blix was stirred out of his sleep. He shut his eyes to the white light and swore mildly.
‘Where are we?’
A minute earlier I should not have been able to say, but bumps just then could only mean mountains and mountains meant Corsica to me. I had never before established my position in accordance with anything so intangible (not to say so invisible) as conflicting air currents, but this time I did.
I relaxed in my seat and announced that we were about an hour from the French coast and told Blix to keep his eyes open for the Maritime Alps. But we never saw them. In an hour we came down out of our ice-white world and at a thousand feet we could see Cannes, ten miles away. We spent that night i
n Paris, and on the afternoon of the next day, Tom Black, Blix, and I sat at the Mayfair in London surrounded by all the comforting accessories to civilization — and drank a toast to Africa because we knew that Africa was gone.
Blix would see it again and so should I one day. And still it was gone. Seeing it again could not be living it again. You can always rediscover an old path and wander over it, but the best you can do then is to say, ‘Ah, yes, I know this turning!’ — or remind yourself that, while you remember that unforgettable valley, the valley no longer remembers you.
XXIII
West With the Night
I HAVE SELDOM DREAMED A dream worth dreaming again, or at least none worth recording. Mine are not enigmatic dreams; they are peopled with characters who are plausible and who do plausible things, and I am the most plausible amongst them. All the characters in my dreams have quiet voices like the voice of the man who telephoned me at Elstree one morning in September of nineteen-thirty-six and told me that there was rain and strong head winds over the west of England and over the Irish Sea, and that there were variable winds and clear skies in mid-Atlantic and fog off the coast of Newfoundland.
‘If you are still determined to fly the Atlantic this late in the year,’ the voice said, ‘the Air Ministry suggests that the weather it is able to forecast for tonight, and for tomorrow morning, will be about the best you can expect.’
The voice had a few other things to say, but not many, and then it was gone, and I lay in bed half-suspecting that the telephone call and the man who made it were only parts of the mediocre dream I had been dreaming. I felt that if I closed my eyes the unreal quality of the message would be re-established, and that, when I opened them again, this would be another ordinary day with its usual beginning and its usual routine.
But of course I could not close my eyes, nor my mind, nor my memory. I could lie there for a few moments — remembering how it had begun, and telling myself, with senseless repetition, that by tomorrow morning I should either have flown the Atlantic to America — or I should not have flown it. In either case this was the day I would try.
I could stare up at the ceiling of my bedroom in Aldenham House, which was a ceiling undistinguished as ceilings go, and feel less resolute than anxious, much less brave than foolhardy. I could say to myself, ‘You needn’t do it, of course,’ knowing at the same time that nothing is so inexorable as a promise to your pride.
I could ask, ‘Why risk it?’ as I have been asked since, and I could answer, ‘Each to his element.’ By his nature a sailor must sail, by his nature a flyer must fly. I could compute that I had flown a quarter of a million miles; and I could foresee that, so long as I had a plane and the sky was there, I should go on flying more miles.
There was nothing extraordinary in this. I had learned a craft and had worked hard learning it. 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.
Record flights had actually never interested me very much for myself. There were people who thought that such flights were done for admiration and publicity, and worse. But of all the records — from Louis Blériot’s first crossing of the English Channel in nineteen hundred and nine, through and beyond Kingsford Smith’s flight from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia — none had been made by amateurs, nor by novices, nor by men or women less than hardened to failure, or less than masters of their trade. None of these was false. They were a company that simple respect and simple ambition made it worth more than an effort to follow.
The Carberrys (of Seramai) were in London and I could remember everything about their dinner party — even the menu. I could remember June Carberry and all her guests, and the man named McCarthy, who lived in Zanzibar, leaning across the table and saying, ‘J. C., why don’t you finance Beryl for a record flight?’
I could lie there staring lazily at the ceiling and recall J. C.’s dry answer: ‘A number of pilots have flown the North Atlantic, west to east. Only Jim Mollison has done it alone the other way — from Ireland. Nobody has done it alone from England — man or woman. I’d be interested in that, but nothing else. If you want to try it, Burl, I’ll back you. I think Edgar Percival could build a plane that would do it, provided you can fly it. Want to chance it?’
‘Yes.’
I could remember saying that better than I could remember anything — except J. C.’s almost ghoulish grin, and his remark that sealed the agreement: ‘It’s a deal, Burl. I’ll furnish the plane and you fly the Atlantic — but, gee, I wouldn’t tackle it for a million. Think of all that black water! Think how cold it is!’
And I had thought of both.
I had thought of both for a while, and then there had been other things to think about. I had moved to Elstree, half-hour’s flight from the Percival Aircraft Works at Gravesend, and almost daily for three months now I had flown down to the factory in a hired plane and watched the Vega Gull they were making for me. I had watched her birth and watched her growth. I had watched her wings take shape, and seen wood and fabric moulded to her ribs to form her long, sleek belly, and I had seen her engine cradled into her frame, and made fast.
The Gull had a turquoise-blue body and silver wings. Edgar Percival had made her with care, with skill, and with worry — the care of a veteran flyer, the skill of a master designer, and the worry of a friend. Actually the plane was a standard sport model with a range of only six hundred and sixty miles. But she had a special undercarriage built to carry the weight of her extra oil and petrol tanks. The tanks were fixed into the wings, into the centre section, and into the cabin itself. In the cabin they formed a wall around my seat, and each tank had a petcock of its own. The petcocks were important.
‘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.’
I had talked to Tom. We had spent hours going over the Atlantic chart, and I had realized that the tinker of Molo, now one of England’s great pilots, had traded his dreams and had got in return a better thing. 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.
‘I’m glad you’re going to do it, Beryl. It won’t be simple. If you can get off the ground in the first place, with such an immense load of fuel, you’ll be alone in that plane about a night and a day — mostly night. Doing it east to west, the wind’s against you. In September, so is the weather. You won’t have a radio. If you misjudge your course only a few degrees, you’ll end up in Labrador or in the sea — so don’t misjudge anything.’
Tom could still grin. He had grinned; he had said: ‘Anyway, it ought to amuse you to think that your financial backer lives on a farm called “Place of Death” and your plane is being built at “Gravesend.” If you were consistent, you’d christen the Gull “The Flying Tombstone.”’
I hadn’t been that consistent. I had watched the building of the plane and I had trained for the flight like an athlete. And now, as I lay in bed, fully awake, I could still hear the quiet voice of the man from the Air Ministry intoning, like the voice of a dispassionate court clerk : ‘ … the weather for tonight and tomorrow … will be about the best you can expect.’ I should have liked to discuss the flight once more with Tom before I took off, but he was on a special job up north. I got out of bed and bathed and put on my flying clothes and took some cold chicken packed in a cardboard box and flew over to the military field at Abingd
on, where the Vega Gull waited for me under the care of the R.A.F. I remember that the weather was clear and still.
Jim Mollison lent me his watch. He said: ‘This is not a gift. I wouldn’t part with it for anything. It got me across the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic too. Don’t lose it — and, for God’s sake, don’t get it wet. Salt water would ruin the works.’
Brian Lewis gave me a life-saving jacket. Brian owned the plane I had been using between Elstree and Gravesend, and he had thought a long time about a farewell gift. What could be more practical than a pneumatic jacket that could be inflated through a rubber tube?
‘You could float around in it for days,’ said Brian. But I had to decide between the life-saver and warm clothes. I couldn’t have both, because of their bulk, and I hate the cold, so I left the jacket.
And Jock Cameron, Brian’s mechanic, gave me a sprig of heather. If it had been a whole bush of heather, complete with roots growing in an earthen jar, I think I should have taken it, bulky or not. The blessing of Scotland, bestowed by a Scotsman, is not to be dismissed. Nor is the well-wishing of a ground mechanic to be taken lightly, for these men are the pilot’s contact with reality.
It is too much that with all those pedestrian centuries behind us we should, in a few decades, have learned to fly; it is too heady a thought, too proud a boast. Only the dirt on a mechanic’s hands, the straining vise, the splintered bolt of steel underfoot on the hangar floor — only these and such anxiety as the face of a Jock Cameron can hold for a pilot and his plane before a flight, serve to remind us that, not unlike the heather, we too are earthbound. We fly, but we have not ‘conquered’ the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick falls across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.
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