![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() With her childhood best friend - a Kenyan boy named Kibii - she learned to jump as high as her head, because Kibii’s elders from the Nandi tribe believed that no man who couldn’t was any good. As a little girl, she survived an attack by lion. Beryl Markham two waysīorn to English parents and raised by her single father, Beryl grew up in the untrammeled bush of East Africa’s Great Rift Valley, running barefoot and spear-hunting with the local boys and men. ![]() Known to the world as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from East to West with the sweep of night, against headwinds and storms particularly ferocious in that direction, she is Amelia Earhart without the pomp, Thoreau with muscle and humor, a luckier Shackleton of the sky. No one has written more lusciously about that pilgrimage, nor undertaken it with more elemental daring, than Beryl Markham (October 16, 1902–August 3, 1986). “For a moment of night,” Henry Beston wrote in his exquisite century-old love letter to darkness, “we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |