West with the Night (29 page)

Arab Ruta went forward to swing the prop. I held my hand on the throttle and searched the fog with my eyes, but only from habit; I have never owned a carpet whose dimensions, imperfections, and limitations were more familiar to me than the surface of the Nairobi Airport. A lot of time had passed since the days of pig-holes, zebra herds, and oil flares. There were runways now, and hangars, and no audience to see the midnight landing of a plane or a dawn take-off; no Kikuyu youths to watch Ruta at his wonderful and mystic tasks. All was commonplace now. Adventure for Nairobi came in celluloid rolls straight from Hollywood, and adventure for other parts of the world went out from Nairobi in celluloid rolls straight from the cameras of professional jungle-trotters. It was a good time to leave.

I nodded, and the propeller whirred to life. Arab Ruta sidestepped with agility born of long practice. I could not hear him say kwaheri, but I saw his lips make the word. I said it too, and felt the small flat gift he had slipped into the cabin a moment before.

I have it still — a travelling clock bound in imitation leather, for which (I later learned) Ruta had hoarded five hundred of my cast-off cigarette coupons, collected quietly and patiently from wastebaskets, safari tents, and hangar sweepings.

The clock keeps time; it rings when you set it. But what a sad substitute, that hysterical jingle, for the soft and soothing voice that used to say, just after dawn, ‘Your tea, Memsahib?’ or long before, ‘Lakwani, it is time to hunt!’

Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.

As we leave for London, swinging up to find the surface of the fog, and, finding it, the Leopard plays at her little game. The rudder bar resists the pressure of my feet, the stick inclines against my hand with almost truculent opposition. But this is momentary. A stern touch overcomes the urge to disobedience, and presently I settle back, flying with the craft and the craft with me.

Blix is already settled. He is comfortably drowsing in our closed cabin, with his feet on the unused seat beside him. It makes little difference to him whether this is the start or the end of a flight. Morpheus has never been his master; Blix is the master of Morpheus. He calls Sleep when he wants it, and it comes. When he does not want it, it stays away, no matter how late the hour or how tiring the day has been.

The first day is tiring enough, but only because the preparations for leaving have left me a bit weary. Night finds us at Juba, where my room in the Rest House, though it has the aspect of a prison cell, affords the fundamental comfort of a bed and protection from mosquitoes.

At dawn I tumble out and see that Blix has left his own room and is pacing back and forth in front of the plane where she is picketed with ropes and stakes. Her fuselage is yellow and her wings silver. Against the barely lighted sky she looks less like a bird than like a rare and brilliant insect, dead, and preserved on a cardboard mat.

We take off without breakfast because ahead of us lies country easier to face with ample time in reserve. Not that the crossing of it is a great aeronautical feat, but that to consider it indifferently might result in a sad aeronautical blunder.

I do not know what the regulations are now, but at that time no woman was allowed to fly solo between Juba and Wadi Halfa without express permission from the Royal Air Force Headquarters at Khartoum.

The reasons for this were plausible enough — a forced landing in the papyrus swamps of the Sudd was barely distinguishable from a forced landing on the banks of the Styx, and a forced landing beyond the Sudd, in the country of the Sudanese and Dinka tribes, might mean days or weeks of searching by the R.A.F., with the chances of recovering the cost of this being somewhat less hopeful than the chances of recovering the lost pilot.

I am a little vague as to why it was thought that women were less capable than men of avoiding these obvious dangers, though I suspect there was more of gallantry than reason in the ruling. In all, I flew the entire route between Nairobi and London six times — four of them solo (after convincing the R.A.F. of my ability to do it), and other women have flown it too. The outstanding error of judgement in flying over the Sudd, as a matter of fact, was made by a man — the late Ernst Udet let himself run out of petrol while crossing it during the dry season and forced-landed on a ridge of hardened mud, where, after several anxious days, he was found by Tom Black, whose understanding of the Sudd was such that he was willing to spend days trying to get somebody out of it. Udet himself was hardly worse for the experience, but his mechanic was near death from mosquito bites.

If you can vizualize twelve thousand square miles of swamp that seethes and crawls like a prehistoric crucible of half-formed life, you have a conception of the Sudd. It is an example of the less attractive by-products of the Nile River, and one place in this world worthy of the word ‘sinister.’ Add to that, ‘eerie’ and ‘treacherous,’ and any other similar adjectives that occur, and the conception may become clearer. The surface of the Sudd, from the air, is flat and green — and inviting. If you should be either hypnotized or forced into landing upon it (and if, miraculously, and impossibly, you didn’t turn over), the wheels of your plane would at once disappear into the muck, while your wings would, in all probability, rest upon the slowly heaving mat of decomposed — and living — growth that in many places is fifteen feet thick and under which flows a sluice of black water.

Assuming that you were thus nestled, unhurt, on the bosom of this interminable slough (whose stench came to your nostrils while you were still a thousand feet above it), and assuming that you had in your plane a radio transmitter through which you contacted Khartoum, giving your position and other details, you might, if you were naïve, expect something to happen. But nothing would, because nothing could.

Boats cannot move in the Sudd, planes cannot land in it, men cannot walk in it. In time a plane
would
arrive, circle a few times and drop provisions, but unless the aim of the pilot were such that he hit a part of your plane directly with his packet of manna, you would have gained nothing. If he did hit it, you would have gained little.

It is, of course, conceivable that, given enough food via bombardment, you might live to a ripe old age and achieve the ultimate in privacy while doing it, but it is more likely that those little minstrels of misery, the mosquitoes, not to say the Devil’s own amphibian armada (crocodiles populate the Sudd), would discourage you long before your hair turned grey — a matter, I should think, of about two weeks.

In any case, the anticipation of such doleful prospects on the part of those civilian pilots permitted by the R.A.F. to chance the Sudd had led to extraordinary caution, and consequently there have been few, if any, lives lost in it.

Our flight contributed no new anecdote about the Sudd. During the four hours we flew over it, Blix and I spoke very little. The Leopard Moth had a closed cabin, and so conversation was possible, but we were in no mood for it.

Our silence was not an awed silence; I think we were simply depressed beyond words with the business of hanging for so long a time under such a flat blue sky and above such a flat virescent swamp. It was hardly like flying. It was like sitting in a plane which, by the aid of wires, dangled equidistant between the floor and the ceiling of a stage-set conceived without benefit of imagination.

Shortly after we left Juba, Blix, in the accepted dormouse style, roused himself long enough to mumble, ‘I smell the Sudd! ‘ — and then he was silent again until the Sudd was gone and both of us could smell the desert.

Beyond the Sudd there is the desert, and nothing but the desert for almost three thousand miles, nor are the towns and cities that live in it successful in gainsaying its emptiness. To me, desert has the quality of darkness; none of the shapes you see in it are real or permanent. Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless, and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there.

And after the desert, the sea. But long before we reached the sea, Blix and I had found that men alone can be more tiresome and give more hindrance than all the sand and all the water that may stretch over a quarter of the globe.

Malakal, Khartoum, Luxor — cities to their inhabitants, islands of regeneration to us. We stopped at each of them, and at each were blessed with that great triumvirate of blessings to the traveller — hot water, food, and sleep. But it was at Cairo that we were surfeited with these. After a flight of three thousand miles in three days, we were detained for an entire week by the majestic workings of the Italian Government. It was one of the incidents which Abdullah Ali had neglected to predict.

Abdullah Ali was in charge of the customs office at Alamza, the Cairo airport. He was also in charge of a small department in the Realm of Things to Come; he told fortunes, and told them well. He loved aviators with a paternal love and, in his way, he gave them guidance that put to shame even their compasses. He was a tall, spare column of a man, dark as a mummy and almost as inscrutable. He fumbled through our papers, glanced at our luggage, and affixed all the necessary stamps. Then he led us outside the customs shed, where the official glint faded from his eyes and in its place came the esoteric glow that illumines the eyes of all true seers. He kneeled in the yellow sand of the huge aerodrome and began to make marks upon it with a polished stick. ‘Before she leaves,’ he said, ‘the lady must have her fortune.’

Blix sighed and looked wistfully toward the city. ‘I’m dying of thirst — and he tells fortunes!’

‘Shh! That’s blasphemy.’

‘I see a journey,’ said Abdullah Ali.

‘They always do,’ said Blix.

‘The lady will fly over a great water to a strange country.’

‘That’s an easy prediction,’ mumbled Blix, ‘with the Mediterranean just ahead.’

‘And she will fly alone,’ said Abdullah Ali.

Blix turned to me. ‘If I am to be abandoned, Beryl, couldn’t you make it a little closer to a bar?’

Abdullah Ali heard nothing of this irreverent comment. He went on making circles and triangles with his wizard’s wand and unravelling my future as if it were already my past. His red fez bobbed up and down, his slender hands moved against the sand like foraging sparrows against snow. He was not really with us nor with the fortune either; he was back there under the shadow of the half-built Sphinx, making marks in the selfsame sand.

When we left him, the polished stick had disappeared and a pencil had taken its place. Abdullah Ali too had disappeared — or was at least transformed. That thin Egyptian with the grey suit and red fez, stooping as he walked through the door of the shed, was only a customs man.

‘Do you believe him?’ said Blix.

A taxicab had scurried across the airport to take us to Shepheard’s Hotel. I got into the car and relaxed against the leather seat.

Who believes in fortune-tellers? Very young girls, I thought, and very old women. I was neither of these.

‘I believe it all,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

I
N NINETEEN-THIRTY-SIX YOU COULD
not fly over any Italian territory without permission from the Italian Government. It is true that you have to clear customs at each international border in any case, but the Italian idea was different.

The Italian idea was based upon the wistful suspicion that no foreigner (certainly no Englishman) could fly over Libya, for instance, and successfully resist the temptation to take candid camera shots of the newly contrived Fascist forts. The Italians, under Mussolini, would have been hurt indeed to know that a pilot existed (and many of them did) who had less curiosity about the Fascist forts than about the exact location of a bar of soap and a tub of hot water. The official reasoning seemed to run about like this: ‘An aviator who shows an interest in our fortresses is guilty of espionage, and one who does not is guilty of disrespect.’ I think the latter crime was, of the two, the more repugnant to the legionnaires of the flowing tunic and the gleaming button.

The symbols of war — impressive desert forts, shiny planes, beetle-browed warships — all inspire the sons of Rome, if not to gallantry, then at least to histrionics, which, in the Italian mind, are synonymous anyway. I sometimes think it must be extremely difficult for the Italian people to remain patient in the face of their armies’ unwavering record of defeat (they looked so resplendent on parade). But there is little complaint.

The answer must be that the country of Caruso has lived a symbolic life for so long that the token has become indistinguishable from the fact or the deed. If an aria can suffice for a fighting heart, a riband draped on any chest can suffice for a general — and the theory of victory, for victory itself.

The one highly placed Italian I knew, and for whom I had respect — as did everybody else who knew him — was the late General Balbo. Balbo was a gentleman among Fascists, and, as such, his death was an act of Fate doubtless designed in the interests of congruity.

He was Governor of Tripolitania at the time Blix and I flew to England, but he had gone into the Southern Desert on routine inspection and so could not intercede, as he had twice done for me, in the matter of speeding our exit from Egypt into Libya.

However futile the Italian military, there is real striking power behind the rubber stamps of petty Italian officials — or there was. They kept Blix and me at Cairo, day after day, withholding our permits to cross the border into Libya. They had no reason, or gave none, and their maddening refusal to do anything whatever except to sit (I think literally) upon our passports, brought the profound observation from Blix that ‘there is no hell like uncertainty, and no greater menace to society than an Italian with three liras worth of authority.’