West with the Night by Beryl Markham Read Free Book Online Page B

and she never rolled in the mud again.
    Punda, as I called him because it is the Swahili word for donkey, went away as he had come, even perhaps with less reason. He may have been received into the herd again like the prodigal son, or he may have been drummed out of it. Animals are not much given to sentiment, so I think it must have been the latter.
    Since then, when I have seen a great herd like that which stampeded under my wings on the Serengetti, I have sometimes watched for an outcast zebra lingering at a distance from its edge. I have thought he would be full-sized now and getting along in years, but that, friendless or not, he would be content in his half loneliness because he could remember that as a mere child he had been a kind of jester and mascot at court.
    What aimless dreaming! The drone of the plane, the steady sun, the long horizon, had all combined to make me forget for a while that time moved swifter than I, that the afternoon was almost spent, that nowhere was there any sign of Woody.
    Or at least there had been a sign — an unmistakable sign which, but for such errant thoughts on an equally errant zebra foal, I might have seen a little sooner.

IV
Why Do We Fly?
    I F YOU WERE TO fly over the Russian steppes in the dead of winter after snow had fallen, and you saw beneath you a date palm green as spring against the white of the land, you might carry on for twenty miles or so before the incongruity of a tropical tree rooted in ice struck against your sense of harmony and made you swing round on your course to look again. You would find that the tree was not a date palm or, if it still persisted in being one, that insanity had claimed you for its own.
    During the five or ten minutes I had watched the herd of game spread like a barbaric invasion across the plain, I had unconsciously observed, almost in their midst, a pool of water bright as a splinter from a glazier’s table.
    I knew that the country below, in spite of its drought-resistant grass, was dry during most of the year. I knew that whatever water holes one did find were opaque and brown, stirred by the feet of drinking game. But the water I saw was not brown; it was clear, and it received the sun and turned it back again in strong sharp gleams of light.
    Like the date palm on the Russian steppes, this crystal pool in the arid roughness of the Serengetti was not only incongruous, it was impossible. And yet, without the slightest hesitation, I flew over it and beyond it until it was gone from sight and from my thoughts.
    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 — and with them the sounds of roving aeroplanes, if their pilots have learned the lessons there are to learn about night weather, distances that seem never to shrink, and the perfidy of landing fields that look like aerodromes by day, but vanish in darkness.
    I watched small shadows creep from the rocks and saw birds in black flocks homeward bound to the scattered bush, and I began to consider my own home and a hot bath and food. Hope always persists beyond reason, and it seemed futile to nurse any longer the expectation of finding Woody with so much of the afternoon already gone. If he were not dead, he would of course light fires by night, but already my fuel was low, I had no emergency rations — and no sleep.
    I had touched my starboard rudder, altering my course east for Nairobi, when the thought first struck me that the shining bit of water I had so calmly flown over was not water at all, but the silvered wings of a Klemm monoplane bright and motionless in the path of the slanting sun.
    It was not really a thought, of course, nor even one of those blinding flashes of realization that come so providentially to the harried heroes of fiction. It was no more than a hunch. But where is there a pilot foolhardy