If you love Africa, horses, flying and kick ass women then you must read "West With The Night". An eloquent, honest and humble autobiography of a woman who puts most of us to shame! Her confidence and capabilities are seriously inspirational and have reignited in me the determination to become the person I dream of being. Beryl was a woman, who without a smidgen of a doubt flew airplanes through the bush, gave the head strong men of the era a run for their money and who was also a successful horse trainer. She was a writer who had the ability to capture the emotions of horses, the bush and aviation in unique descriptions written with particular prowess. Below are a couple of excerpts from her book which I especially admired.
"Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the candle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home'. It is all these things but one thing - it is never dull." p.7
"I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep - leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late." p.117
"A country laved with icy streams, its valleys choked with bracken, its hill clothed in the green heather that wandered Scotsman sing about, seems hardly Africa. Not a stone has a familiar cast; the sky and the earth meet like strangers, and the touch of the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things." p. 125
"'When you fly', the young man said, 'you get a feeling of possession that you couldn't have if you owned all of Africa. You feel that everything you see belongs to you - all the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours. It makes you feel bigger than you are - closer to being something you've sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to seriously imagine.'" p.135
"A word grows to a thought - a thought to an idea - an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take." p. 135
Mwiba Update: January to March 2012.
Picture of the tent and the lady with bangles by Lizzie Halloran...for more of her pics click here
