Beryl Markham

We sat in the Wilson Airways office later that same afternoon when the Voi District Commissioner telephoned to say that Denys and his Kikuyu boy were dead. Their plane had taken off from the runway, circled twice, and the dived to the earth, where it burned. No one ever learned why. Tom had kept me from a trip and Arab Ruta had asked a question. They had known, and I have wondered how they knew, and I have found an answer for myself. Denys was a keystone in an arch whose other stones were other lives. If a keystone trembles, the arch will carry the warning along its entire curve, then, if the keystone is crushed, the arch will fall, leaving its lesser stones heaped close together, though for a while without design. Denys’ death left some lives without design, but they were rebuilt again, as lives and stones are, into other patterns.

West With The Night