For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.
I have lifted my plane . . . for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the Earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of first-born adventure.
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.
I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.
This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets – and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.
The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening.
A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.
To an eagle or to an owl or to a rabbit, man must seem a masterful and yet a forlorn animal; he has but two friends. In his almost universal unpopularity he points out, with pride, that these two are the dog and the horse.
I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains – the drab and dowdy digger in the earth.
It is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.
To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe.
![Beryl Markham Quote - [Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/elephants-are-less-agile-and-physically-less-adapt.jpg)
![Beryl Markham Quote - [Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/grey-elephants-are-less-agile-and-physically-.jpg)
![Beryl Markham Quote - [Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/blue-elephants-are-less-agile-and-physically-.jpg)
![Beryl Markham Quote - [Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/red-elephants-are-less-agile-and-physically-.jpg)
![Beryl Markham Quote - [Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/brown-elephants-are-less-agile-and-physically-.jpg)
![Beryl Markham Quote - [Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/white-elephants-are-less-agile-and-physically-.jpg)
