British aviator Beryl Markham is mobbed by reporters when she arrived at the Ritz Carlton Hotel on September 6, 1936. The plaster on her forehead covers cuts suffered when she crashed on the shore of Baleine Cove, Breton Island, Canada, due to a gasoline shortage caused by ice on the fuel tank. Her plane was badly damaged, but she escaped with a scratched face and a bruised body. She was trying to fly from Europe to New York. Although she did not reach New York, she became the first woman to fly the Atlantic east-west solo.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

~Beryl Markham

(Book: West with the Night)

We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.

~From the book West with the Night, Beryl Markham, 1942.