East Africa West with the Night Beryl Markham Raised by her father on a large farm in British East Africa in the early 1900s, Beryl Markham preferred spear hunting with the Muranis to school lessons. She learns to care for and train horses for racing by her father's side, a skill that comes in handy when her father loses their farm and leaves for Peru. Alone in Africa at 17 years of age, she begins a highly successful career as a race horse trainer. In her 20s, Markham's passion shifts from horses to airplanes; the first woman in East Africa to be granted a commercial pilot's license, she flies supplies and mail to remote corners of the continent. In 1936 she garners another first, becoming the first woman to fly the Atlantic from East to West. Markham writes of what it is like to fly alone over water for 40 hours: "Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in the semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but your own small courage.... such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger."