Aerodynamic Diana

WEST WITH THE NIGHT--Beryl Markham--Houghton Mlfflin ($3).

West With The Night is a tough, un even, undisciplined, sometimes remarkable, often annoying book--chiefly about Aviatrix Beryl Markham's experiences in the hot blue skies and green hills of Africa. Author Markham reveals herself as a self-made extravert, a museum sample of 20th-century primitivism at its simplest. Her harsh, keen story is a sort of Diana myth brought up to date.

Leopard By Her Bed. Beryl Markham came to the subtlest and most primal of continents when she was four, to a farm that was painfully hacked out of the dense Kenya forests near Nairobi. Her principal childhood companions were her hard, taciturn, horse-breeding father, some half-naked Negro huntsmen and a ferocious bulldog hybrid named Duller, who somehow survived abduction (from the foot of little Miss Markham's bed) by a leopard, which did not.

Hers was a full childhood. Beryl used to rip out the quivering stomachs of freshly slain reedbuck to feed her dogs. She was once (as a Sikh phrased it to her father) "moderately eaten" by a lion. Attacked by her father's pet baboon, she beat it to death with her knobkerrie.

Destiny with Pliers. A promising career as a trainer of race horses was interrupted when one day, in the person of Pilot Tom Black, famed African longdistance flyer, she met "Destiny with pliers in his hand." Tom Black taught Beryl to fly. She became a free-lance pilot, adept in all the lordly and dangerous aerial perspectives of an abstruse continent, which she often superbly implies but seldom traps in words. She was, so far as she knows, the first woman to fly the mails in Africa. She was certainly the first human being to scout for elephants by air.

One day, after a tight squeak with elephants, floods, striking porters, Beryl Markham decided to fly to London. A year in London taught her, for the first time in her busy life, how "to discuss the bore dom of being alive with any intelligence." So it was only a question of time until she would escape from boredom through action. She escaped by flying the Atlantic.

Before she took off, Atlantic Flyer Jim Mollison lent her his wrist watch, saying, "For God's sake, don't get it wet. Salt water would ruin the works." Author Markham kept the watch dry, but she cracked up in a Cape Breton bog. She was the first woman to fly the Atlantic, eastwest. But even Author Markham could not fly the Atlantic every day.

She is now a technical adviser for Hollywood flying films.

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