Summary of Beryl Markham's West with the Night

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 I would like to begin at the beginning, but there are a hundred places to start and a hundred names. I can begin by choosing one of them, not because it is first or of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because it is turned uppermost in my logbook.

#2 Nungwe was a town that lay west and south of Nairobi on the southernmost rim of Lake Victoria Nyanza. It was barely alive when I went there in 1935. It was a Mecca for gold miners, who had begun to dig there.

#3 Nairobi was a gateway to a new country, and it was growing quickly. It was a place of shillings and pounds and land sales and trade, extraordinary successes and failures. Its shops sold whatever you needed to buy.

#4 Africa is a land full of mysteries, wildness, and heat. It is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, and an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you want it to be, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669388692

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Insights on Beryl Markham's West with the Night

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I would like to begin at the beginning, but there are a hundred places to start and a hundred names. I can begin by choosing one of them, not because it is first or of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because it is turned uppermost in my logbook.

#2

Nungwe was a town that lay west and south of Nairobi on the southernmost rim of Lake Victoria Nyanza. It was barely alive when I went there in 1935. It was a Mecca for gold miners, who had begun to dig there.

#3

Nairobi was a gateway to a new country, and it was growing quickly. It was a place of shillings and pounds and land sales and trade, extraordinary successes and failures. Its shops sold whatever you needed to buy.

#4

Africa is a land full of mysteries, wildness, and heat. It is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, and an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you want it to be, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one.

#5

I was the only professional woman pilot in Africa at the time. I had no free-lance competition in Kenya, and I was often called upon to fly messages at night. The darkness alone can be a lonely experience, and the existence of other people seems not even a remote possibility.

#6

There is a sort of guild for pilots that requires only a understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship. It is a camaraderie without any sentiment.

#7

I was going to Nungwe, a small town in Kenya. It was not a spectacular flight, and not newsworthy. It was a simple hop from Nairobi to Nungwe, and to me, that was unspectacular and even tedious. But