She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. 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. 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. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. One of the most beautifully crafted books I have ever read, with some of the most poetic prose passages I could imagine, such as the following, resonating with a stately and timeless quality so absent in our modern life: There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing.
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