NYS CC ELA Regents January 2024 Part III

Why Do We Fly?

…During the five or ten minutes I had watched the herd of game spread like a barbaric

invasion across the plain, I had unconsciously observed, almost in their midst, a pool of

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water bright as a splinter from a glazier’s (1) table. …

Like the date palm on the Russian steppes, this crystal pool in the arid roughness of

(5) the Serengetti was not only incongruous, it was impossible. And yet, without the slightest

hesitation, I flew over it and beyond it until it was gone from sight and from my thoughts.

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There is no twilight in East Africa. Night tramps on the heels of Day with little gallantry

and takes the place she lately held, in severe and humourless silence. Sounds of the things

that live in the sun are quickly gone — and with them the sounds of roving aeroplanes,

(10) if their pilots have learned the lessons there are to learn about night weather, distances

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that seem never to shrink, and the perfidy (2)  of landing fields that look like aerodromes by

day, but vanish in darkness.

I watched small shadows creep from the rocks and saw birds in black flocks homeward

bound to the scattered bush, and I began to consider my own home and a hot bath and

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(15) food. Hope always persists beyond reason, and it seemed futile to nurse any longer the

expectation of finding Woody with so much of the afternoon already gone. If he were

not dead, he would of course light fires by night, but already my fuel was low, I had no

emergency rations — and no sleep.

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I had touched my starboard rudder, altering my course east for Nairobi, when the

(20) thought first struck me that the shining bit of water I had so calmly flown over was not water at all, but the silvered wings of a Klemm monoplane bright and motionless in the path of the slanting sun. …

But before considering any of this, I had already reversed my direction, lost altitude,

and opened the throttle again. It was a race with racing shadows, a friendly trial between

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(25) the sun and me.

As I flew, my hunch became conviction. Nothing in the world, I thought, could have

looked so much like reflecting water as the wings of Woody’s plane. I remembered how

bright those wings had been when last I saw them, freshly painted to shine like silver or

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stainless steel. Yet they were only of flimsy wood and cloth and hardened glue.

(30) The deception had amused Woody. ‘All metal,’ he would say, jerking a thumb toward

the Klemm; ‘all metal, except just the wings and fuselage (3)  and prop and little things like

that. Everything else is metal — even the engine.’

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Even the engine! — as much of a joke to us as to the arrant winds of Equatorial Africa;

a toy engine with bustling manner and frantic voice; an hysterical engine, guilty at last

(35) perhaps of what, in spite of Woody’s jokes and our own, we all had feared.

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Now almost certainly guilty, I thought, for there at last was what I hunted — not an

incredible pool of water, but, unmistakable this time, the Klemm huddled to earth like

a shot bird, not crushed, but lifeless and alone, beside it no fire, not even a stick with a

fluttering rag. …

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(40) I throttled down, allowing just enough revs to prevent the ship from stalling at the slow

speed required to land in so small a space. Flattening out and swinging the tail from side to

side in order to get what limited vision I could at the ground below and directly ahead,

I flew in gently and brought the Avian to earth in a surprisingly smooth run. I made a mental note at the time that the take-off, especially if Woody were aboard, might be a good

(45) deal more difficult.

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But there was no Woody.

I climbed out, got my dusty and dented water bottle from the locker, and walked over

to the Klemm, motionless and still glittering in the late light. I stood in front of her wings

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and saw no sign of mishap, and heard nothing. There she rested, frail and feminine, against

(50) the rough, grey ground, her pretty wings unmarked, her propeller rakishly tilted, her cockpit empty. …

I found a path with the grass bent down and little stones scuffed from their hollows, and

I followed it past some larger stones into a tangle of thorn trees. I shouted for Woody and

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got nothing but my own voice for an answer, but when I turned my head to shout again,

(55) I saw two boulders leaning together, and in the cleft they made were a pair of legs clothed in grimy work slacks and, beyond the legs, the rest of Woody, face down with his head in the crook of his arm.

I went over to where he was, unscrewed the cap of the water bottle and leaned down

and shook him. …

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(60) Woody began to back out of the cleft of the rocks with a motion irrelevantly

reminiscent (4) of the delectable crayfish of the South of France. He was mumbling, and

I recalled that men dying of thirst are likely to mumble and that what they want is water.

I poured a few drops on the back of his neck as it appeared and got, for my pains, a startled

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grunt. It was followed by a few of those exquisite words common to the vocabularies of

(65) sailors, airplane pilots, and stevedores — and then abruptly Woody was sitting upright on

the ground, his face skinny beneath a dirty beard, his lips cinder-dry and split, his eyes

red-rimmed and sunk in his cheeks. He was a sick man and he was grinning. …

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‘Why do we fly?’ said Woody. ‘We could do other things. We could work in offices, or

have farms, or get into the Civil Service. We could…’

(70) ‘We could give up flying tomorrow. You could, anyhow. You could walk away from your

plane and never put your feet on a rudder bar again. You could forget about weather and

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night flights and forced landings, and passengers who get airsick, and spare parts that you

can’t find, and wonderful new ships that you can’t buy. You could forget all that and go off

somewhere away from Africa and never look at an aerodrome again. You might be a very

(75) happy man, so why don’t you?’

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‘I couldn’t bear it,’ said Woody. ‘It would all be so dull.’ …

—Beryl Markham

“Why Do We Fly?”

excerpted from West With the Night, 2013

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North Point Press

1: glazier's- glass cutter's

2: perfidy- betrayal

3: fuselage- body of the plane

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4: reminiscent- suggestive