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Extract from "West With The Night" by Beryl Markham, regarding her record breaking flight in September 1936, when aiming for New York, icing resulted in a forced landing in N.S.
"The engine cuts again and I begin to glide, but now I am not worried; she will start again, as she has done, and I will gain altitude and fly into Sydney.
But she doesn’t start. This time she’d dead as death; the Gull settles earthward
and it isn’t any earth I know. It
is black earth stuck with boulders and I hang above it, on hope and on a
motionless propellor. Only I
cannot hang long.
The earth hurries to meet me, I bank, turn, and sideslip
to dodge the boulders, my wheels touch, and I feel them submerge. The nose of the plane is engulfed in
mud, and I go forward striking my head on the glass of the cabin front, hearing
it shatter, feeling blood pour over my face.
I stumble out of the plane and sink to my knees in muck
and stand there foolishly staring, not at the lifeless land, but at my
watch. Twenty-one hours and
twenty-five minutes.
Atlantic flight.
Abingdon, England, to a nameless swamp – non-stop".
ALL THE DISEASES OF THE WORLD...
Describing the arrival at the hotel in Benghazi after crossing the Sudan enroute Nairobi-London.
In the end we gave up. We were hungry and thirsty and dead tired. “Find any place said Blix. “Anywhere so long as it has a couple of rooms!”
“Anywhere” was the dirty fringe of Benghazi……. “Anywhere”
was arrived at through a web work of pinched and broken streets, dark, swept
with the odours of poverty, the trapped and stagnant smells of stagnant
life. “Anywhere” was the anywhere
of all cities – the refuse heap of human shards.
A door opened down the yard and a woman came toward
us. She had a lighted candle and lifted
it close to our faces. Her own
face held the lineage of several races, none of which had given it
distinction. It was just a husk
with eyes. She spoke, but we
understood nothing. Hers was a
language neither of us had ever heard.
…..
She showed us to two rooms…. Each contained an iron bed that cowered under a sticky blanket and had an uncovered pillow at its head. One room had a white enamel basin on the floor, and the jug to match it was on the floor of the other. Everything lay under scales of filth.
“All the diseases of the world live here” I said to Blix.
He was laconic. “So do we, until tomorrow”.
