CHAPTER 1
The Waterjump
Beryl Markham wondered how much longer she could stay awake. Cramped inside thecockpit between two petrol tanks, she had been piloting the single engineairplane for more than nineteen hours without a rest. She had been flying blind,unable to see anything but darkness and fog outside the cabin window. She hadbeen flying silent, without a radio transmitter to guide her or keep her companythrough the long stormy night. She had been flying without even a life jacket,for there was not enough room inside the cabin to hold that lifesaving equipmentand the necessary extra tanks of fuel.
Now at last it was morning and the fog had begun to thin. Through the skin ofice that had formed on the inside of the cabin window, she saw the lights of aship far below her on the Atlantic Ocean. She felt a sudden exhilaration. Still,she could not be certain just where she was. England and Ireland were behindher. She could only hope that she had not drifted off course and that somewhereahead, hidden under the ribbons of fog, were the cliffs of Newfoundland.
In September, 1936, no man or woman had ever flown an airplane east to westacross the Atlantic Ocean. Beryl was intending to be the first. The airplanethat she was piloting was a single engine Vega Gull christened The Messenger.Her friends in England had teased her that it should be called instead TheFlying Tombstone. For flying an airplane the wrong way across the Atlantic Oceanwas a dangerous thing to attempt. Some had called it suicidal. Strong head windswould slow the plane down and use up most of its fuel. In September, bad weathercould skid her off course. Even a few degrees off course could mean not reachingland before her fuel ran out.
"I wouldn't tackle it for a million," J. C. Carberry had told her, even thoughhe was the one who had dared her to do it and then put up the money to build theairplane. "Think of all that black water!" he said, smiling grimly. "Think howcold it is!"
But Beryl had been in dangerous spots before and had used her wits to pull herthrough. In the highlands of East Africa, where she had spent her childhood, shehad been attacked by a lion. She had hunted wild boar with arap Maina, aKipsigis warrior. She had ridden her father's wild stallions across the fieldsof his farm in Njoro. Beryl Markham rather liked danger. It made her feel alive.She had been afraid to try this incredible waterjump. She had lain in her bedjust yesterday morning and considered bailing out of the agreement she had madewith J. C. But long ago her father and arap Maina had taught her that if a thingwere worth doing, then she must swallow her fear and do it well.
At five o'clock the previous afternoon, Beryl had stood on the airfield inAbingdon, England. The weather forecast was not good: head winds of forty tofifty miles per hour and rolling in off the Atlantic, heavy thunderstorms. Asmall crowd of newspaper reporters and photographers had gathered at theairfield. They had been dogging her for days. Why are you doing this? they hadpressed. Why risk your life?
The names of other pilots—Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Jim Mollison—werealready in the record books. Like them, Beryl Markham was a professional pilot.She had more than 2,000 hours of flying experience. She cared nothing forsetting new records. Nor was she anxious to die. How could she explain to thesereporters about her father and arap Maina and the lessons they and Africa hadtaught her? How could they understand why it was important that she swallow herfears and move forward? She couldn't explain it to them. She didn't try. Heranswer was simply, "Flying is my job and this Atlantic flight is part of it."
Beryl had crawled into the cockpit and taken off into a rainy sky. Onceairborne, confidence and concentration had replaced fear. But now, afternineteen hours of fog and rain and sleet, she was exhausted. The Gull's enginedroned. Beryl's eyes burned and her head felt heavy. Her legs and back werecramped. A shadow appeared in the fog ahead. Beryl squinted through the ice onthe window, hoping the shadow was land. Then she smiled. Cliffs were standing inthe sea, reaching up to her. The land might be Labrador or Newfoundland. Herdestination was New York City. But here at least was solid ground. She couldfollow the coast south to Sydney, Nova Scotia, where she could land, refuel, andtake off again. She began to hum. The hard part—the hundreds of miles of cold,black water and the droning loneliness—was nearly over.
Then suddenly, the droning ceased. The engine coughed, then died. The Messengerbegan to lose altitude. The fuel gauge was near empty, but the plane shouldstill have had enough petrol to make land. A few more miles, Beryl thought asher free hand quickly turned on and off the handles of each empty petrol tank,hoping to unclog what she believed must be an airlock. The handles' sharp metalpins bit into the palms of her hand. The engine caught and climbed, then spatand sputtered and dove again. Beryl stared hard at the cliffs ahead. Theboulders on the beach would surely shred the The Messenger's belly. Withbleeding hands, Beryl pulled back on the stick to keep the Gull in the air,trying to clear the cliffs. Just a few more miles, she thought, a few moremoments.
Again the engine cut out. The single propeller swung slowly, then stopped. TheGull glided, as silent as a sea bird floating above land. The realization thatshe had failed struck Beryl as hard as the ground rushing up to snag the Gull'snose. The powerful impact threw her forward, smashing her head against thewindshield. She heard the glass shatter. Then all was quiet.
CHAPTER 2
Lakweit
A voice called to her. "Lakweit!" It was the voice of arap Maina. "Your eyes arefilled with clouds today, Lakweit!"
In Swahili, lakweit means "little girl." Beryl was no more than seven years old,but already she was tall and slender and strong. Her hair was straw yellow andhung in her eyes. She wore no hair ribbons the way other little British girlsliving in East Africa in 1909 did. Instead, a cowrie shell hung around her waiston a leather cord. The Africans who worked for Charles Clutterbuck, Beryl'sfather, had tied the shell around her in order to keep away evil spirits.
"Lakweit! Bend down and look so that you may learn." Arap Maina was the Africanwhom Beryl's father had assigned as the child's personal servant. Arap was aterm of respect, and Beryl listened carefully to her guardian. "See how thisleaf is crushed. Feel the wetness of this dung."
He was her teacher, and her classroom was the Great Rift Valley in the countrythat would become known, years later, as Kenya. At the beginning of thetwentieth century, British pioneers like Charles Clutterbuck controlled theland. Beryl was the daughter of mazungu, the white man. She had a mother, butClara Clutterbuck had gone away long ago. The Kipsigis and Nandi peoples,Africans from two different tribes who worked for Clutterbuck on his farm inNjoro, had accepted his lakweit into their lives without question.
Very often Beryl woke before dawn and stood barefoot in grass as high as hershoulders and still wet and cold with night dew. Before her, the valley turnedpurple in the morning sunlight. Behind her were the stables that housed herfather's racehorses and, beyond the stables, the tall blue cedars of the MauForest. Very soon, the syces, or African servants, would begin shoveling themanure out of the horse stalls and into the spreading sunshine. But by then,Beryl and her dog, Buller, would be gone, having silently escaped across thevalley to be with arap Maina and Kibii.
Kibii was arap Maina's son. He was younger than Beryl by a few years, but thetwo children—one female and British, the other male and African—spent their daystogether. Swinging on vines, wrestling with each other, jumping straight up ashigh as they could, hiding in wild pig holes—games like these were more thanjust play. They were an important part of an African child's education. LikeKibii and the other totos, or children, Beryl played hard. The games shaped heryoung muscles and sharpened her senses. She learned how to read a crushed leafand wet dung and know what wild creature—a water buffalo or a zebra—had passed.Beryl had not yet been to a formal school, but she knew many things. She knewhow to skin a buck, how to catch moles for the money her father paid her, how totreat a snakebite. And although she had not yet shot a gun or thrown a spear,she knew that the best way to lame a charging lion was to wound him in theshoulder.
Each morning the head syce rang the large bell near the stables to announce thebeginning of another day of work. Before anyone could stop her, Beryl wouldbegin to run, a sort of hop and skip gait that she had learned by imitating theNandi warriors. The ground over which she loped had been formed by volcaniceruptions more than 15 million years ago when one continent—Africa—had collidedwith another—Eurasia. In the violence of that collision, the walls of the GreatRift rose thousands of feet above sea level, cradling an immense valley.
Volcanic eruptions had shaped the land, giving it unique characteristics—sheer,jagged cliffs, a flat floor of desert bush with scattered thorn trees. Now theland was shaping Beryl. Its spine of volcanic rubble still poked through thespongy valley floor, but Beryl's bare feet had long ago toughened to itssharpness. At seven years old, she was already a lover of all things wild andfree. The highlands was her home, and her home was alive with the chatter andrumble of a thousand living things. Her home was the whistle and click ofreedbuck darting through the grass. It was the bark of leopards stalking closeto the white settlers' houses, hunting their domesticated dogs. It was thescratchscratch of dik-diks no bigger than rabbits using their hind legs to covertheir droppings. The voice of arap Maina called to her. The voice of the landcalled to her, too. And Lakweit ran, answering the call.
But life for Beryl would not remain so wild and free for very long. Many pioneersettlers in the highlands did not approve of the way Charles Clutterbuck—calledClutt by his friends—was raising his daughter. It was not proper for a whitechild, a girl particularly, to run wild like some creature in the bush, sniffinganimal dung. Why was she not at home learning arithmetic and British history?Nor was it proper for her to roam unchaperoned among the Africans whose moralswere clearly not the same as theirs. The cowrie shell was an example. Was it notthe symbol of female genitalia? The Kipsigis tied the shell around the waists oftheir own female children soon after birth. Yes, something had to be done aboutClutt's wild child. After all, Beryl was a British subject.
Beryl Clutterbuck was born in England on October 26, 1902. She was the secondchild. Her brother Richard was two years older. Her Irish mother, ClaraAlexander, was an excellent horsewoman. Clara's greatest love was fox hunting, asport that was challenging to even the best equestrian. Soon after Beryl wasborn, Clara was thundering again through fields and woods on her horse, chasingfox.
Clutt was also a strong rider. He had once been an officer in the army, but bythe time Beryl was born, his occupation was listed on the child's birthcertificate as farmer. What Clutt knew best was how to handle horses. In 1904,he began to consider leaving England and its ruddy fox for a wilder place withfiercer game—the highlands of East Africa. The British government had recentlygained control of that part of Africa. It called its newest colony BEA, forBritish East Africa, and described its occupation as a protectorate, a superiorpower in control over a dependent people. Now it was offering parcels of Africanland to British citizens for the low price of approximately seven cents an acre.Here was a country where every white settler could be the lord of his own manor.The red soil was so rich that sweet potatoes could grow to forty pounds, or sothe rumors went. To encourage white settlement, the government had justcompleted the construction of a railroad line from the harbor town of Mombasa onthe Indian Ocean inland to Nairobi. From there, the train line struggledupcountry nine thousand feet into the highlands and across the Great RiftValley, ending at Kisumu on Lake Victoria.
The Africans called the line the Iron Snake. In England, they called it theLunatic Line, a train to nowhere. Many people believed that the altitude of themountains was too high for the air to be healthy and that the equatorial suncould weaken the heart, liver, and spleen of light-skinned Europeans. The "town"of Nairobi was nothing more than a cluster of tin shacks along the rail line.Beyond Nairobi, the country had no roads, no hospitals, and few farms.
Then there was the resistance of the Africans. The Kikuyu, in particular, viewedthe white settlers as invaders and used poison-tipped arrows to drive them offtheir land. To maintain control and to display superior force, a small Britisharmy known as the Third Battalion of the King's African Rifles (KAR) patrolledthe colony, putting down with bullet and bayonet what the British referred to as"savage" rebellions.
If Clutt knew about the poison-tipped arrows of the Kikuyus or the bayonets ofthe KAR, it did not change his mind. Six weeks after learning about the land forsale in BEA, Clutt sold most everything that he and Clara owned. Beryl was noteven two years old and her brother just four when the family left England,taking with them some pieces of antique furniture and an English sheepdog. Berylremembered only sailing for a long time on a ship that seemed to climb "the hillof the sea and never reach[ed] the top."
In the highlands, days are hot and sunny and dry. The nights are often coldenough for frost. Charles found work managing a dairy owned by a Britisharistocrat who had also emigrated to BEA, Lord Hugh Cholmondeley Delamere. LordDelamere called his African home on the foothills of the Mau Forest "EquatorRanch," because the equator ran through one corner of his property. Even so,Delamere hated the sun. He had once become very ill with sun sickness, and everyday as he rode across his thousands of acres, inspecting barbed wire fences andthe health of his cattle, he wore a large pith helmet to shade his face. His redhair hung long to his shoulders and protected his neck from the sun. LordDelamere was not the only one who feared the sun. A common article of clothingworn by the settlers was a spine pad, a sort of flannel belt or cummerbund thatEuropeans believed could prevent the rays of the sun from damaging vitalinternal organs.
Lord Delamere and his wife Florence became two of the most influential of thewhite settlers in BEA. Although they were lord and lady, the Delameres lived asmost settlers did in a mud hut called a rondavel. The dark walls of mud werecool against the beating sun. At night when temperatures dropped low enough forfrost, the mud walls prevented drafts. The floor of the hut was also made ofearth, tamped and polished as smooth as clay, but unlevel just the same. TheDelameres' wooden dining table and sideboard sat at cockeyed angles inside thehut.
Glass windows and wooden doors with locks might have been practical in England,but not in BEA. A burlap sack worked just as well. The Delameres' front doorfaced the sweeping plains below, thick with herds of zebra and wildebeest andThompson's gazelles—called Tommies by the British—that had roamed there longbefore the Iron Snake found its way into the highlands.
Clara and her children lived in a similar hut on the Delameres' land while Cluttmanaged the dairy. For Clara, living inside a mud shanty and eating tinnedpeaches and fresh-butchered Tommy chops for breakfast, lunch, and often againfor dinner was a primitive way of life, even if the cooked chops were served onchina dishes shipped from England. But at least Clara and her children had afriend in Florence. Like Clara, Florence was Irish. Once, she had also enjoyedfoxhunting and dancing and dresses of chiffon and lace. But this was a differentplace and a different time. The men rose at four in the morning. As the dawnbroke, Clara might have heard Delamere's gramophone playing one of his favoritemelodies. As the day ended, she might have heard the clamor of voices from theMasai herdsmen who crowded with their spears inside the Delameres' hut to talkof cattle and to share their own folktales. Between sunrise and sunset, thewomen pioneers worked as hard as the men. They hunted game. They butchered theirown meat. They cared for the livestock, including chickens, pigs, and ostriches.
With Delamere's help, Clutt was able to stake his own farm at Njoro. He calledit Green Hill Farm. Nothing could be planted in the red soil, however, until thesnarls of grass, boulders, and ant hills were cleared away. Years later in herautobiographical book, West with the Night, Beryl described the farm at Njoro:
"It looked like this at first: It was a broad stretch of land, part of it openvalley, but most of it roofed with the heads of high trees—cedar, ebony, mahogo,teak, and bamboo—and their trunks were snared in miles of creeping plants. Thecreeping plants rose to heights of twelve and fifteen feet and, from the ground,you never saw the tops of the trees until they fell from the blows of axes andwere dragged away by teams of oxen handled by Dutchmen with whips that crackedall day."
