2016届高考英语高分冲刺特训听力素材3（word版）22_高考复习指南

2016届高考英语高分冲刺特训听力素材3（word版）22

　　"She was beautiful. She was very seductive. She was well born. And she was strong and ambitious and fearless and smart. So, you know, it's a lot to take."

　　Ironically, recognition did come to Beryl Markham, but only in the last years of her life. Since West with the Night was reissued three years ago, it's sold briskly. There are 300,000 copies in print now, and royalties from the book gave much needed financial security. More recognition will come with the showing on public television this week, of the documentary about her. More recognitions still, when Mary Lovell's biography comes out next spring. And another biography is in the work for publication in a few years. So the story of the woman who flew west on that difficult, dangerous night in 1936 will be told and re-told.

　　Through the darkness, wedged between extra fuel tanks that had been fitted into the cabin for the long journey, her small plane bucking fog and storms and headwinds, the Atlantic Ocean black beneath her, Beryl Markham flew west with the night, completely alone.

　　"You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents, each man to see what the other looked like. 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 semi-darkness. Nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage. Nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces and hopes rooted in your mind. Such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger."