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On the 6th December, 1856, I embarked, with my wife, on board the Royal Mail Screw Steamer Ireland (Lyons McLeod, "Travels in Eastern Africa," 1860).

They were still dancing when, just before dawn on October 19th, 1930, the Azay le Rideau came into harbour at Djibouti (Evelyn Waugh, "Remote People," 1931).

Side by side we stand in silence by the ship's rails (Dorothy Oliver, "Four Wheels Across Africa," 1980).

Since the 1930s the airplane has been a solid favorite. Crack any recent travel book about Africa and you have an excellent chance of finding the author in the first or second sentence on an airplane, in an airport or driving to the airport. Consider these first sentences:

The plane got into Kinshasa at three in the morning (Alex Shoumatoff, "In Southern Light," 1986).

Our plane landed at daybreak (Karl Eskelund, "While God Slept," 1961).

As I boarded the plane for my second return home ... (Rosa Claudette Anderson, "River Face Homeward," 1966).

We touched down at noon. (Dervla Murphy, "Cameroon with Egbert," 1990).

If the book does not open with an airplane or a ship, it very likely starts with some other form of transportation: trains or train stations, an automobile such as a land rover or a taxi, a motorcycle or occasionally, draft animals such as camel or oxen.

Perhaps my point will seem obvious. Books about Africa tend to open with getting there. Travel is about transportation, after all. Since Europe and America do lie some distance from Africa, isn't it sensible to have planes and ships? Doesn't it make a kind of literary sense to start a book about places distant to the reader with vessels of one sort or another? Even if the place is not distant from the author?

Let me put my observation in a different way.

Only one of the books I came across, and I flipped through more than 200, opens with the form of transportation most common in Africa and to Africans: oneself. That is, on foot. The one exception I found refers so indirectly to walking that it hardly seems worth mentioning (L. M. Nesbitt, "Hell-hole of Creation," 1935).

Even those books about hiking through Africa do not start with the narrator on foot. The only book I could find that genuinely starts with someone on foot is not a travel book. It is a novel by Maria Thomas, an American writer who lived and worked in Africa for 12 years and whose death in 1989 only makes what little work of hers we have seem all the more compelling. I include it not as an exception (which of course it cannot be since it exists outside of the genre) but as a critical comment. Her novel "Antonia Saw the Oryx First" (1987) starts "Like an African, the white doctor came to work on foot."

This is the power of fiction: It can say in 11 words and one image what I will only belabor in explaining. Maria Thomas opens with a white person walking on African soil. Not sailing, not riding, not flying, not above-walking. And that walking is not in a wilderness or on safari. Her doctor is in the midst of. She is in a city and surrounded by people. And not for the first time -- this is no arrival scene. Perhaps Maria Thomas had also noted all the machines. I like to think so. As she points out a few lines later, "No one white ever walked in Africa."

I understand why authors don't want to start their books with walking. The problem is that walking is too, well, pedestrian. It is commonplace, and it does not provide the opportunity to do what any travel writer worth their salt is trying to do -- give you the big picture. The walker sees only details, the rider sees the world. In fact, the point of opening with the foreigner inside or astride some vehicle seems to be to provide a vista. The oval pane of the airplane window, the trapezoid pane of the car window, the railing of a ship, all furnish a frame through which we see an entirety: Africa. In my sample of airplane-initiated books, six start with aerial views. I list a few of these here, despite their length, to show you how powerful such an opening is.

Seen from the air west of Cape Verde, at the Westernmost point of Africa, in Senegal, the ocean sunrise, clear red-blue, turns an ominous yellow, and the sun itself is shrouded, ghostly, in this dust of the northeast trade wind of the dry season, known as harmattan, that blows across the great Sahara desert (Peter Matthiessen, "African Silences," 1991).

The plane flew low over the Mauritanian desert. One could pick out the routes of ancient dried-up rivers cut into the eternity of mountainous, uninhabitable rock. But at this height it all looked reassuringly small, like a child's excavations on a beach ... It rapidly became dark, and soon only a ribbon of pink separated the blackness of the sky from the blueness of the haze over the earth, into which we descended as though into an abyss (Mark Hudson, "Our Grandmothers' Drums," 1989).

From the window of the small plane, I looked down and saw the wooded savanna where I would live for the next year. The landscape was dotted with Senufo villages, like models we might have built in grade school geography, tiny and seemingly perfect ... Just outside each village, clearly visible from the air, was a dense circle of trees -- the sacred grove ... The groves had been there long before airplanes were invented, and the thick vegetation had hidden what was inside from curious eyes like mine. Although I peered down, it felt like cheating (Carol Spindel, "In the Shadow of the Sacred Grove," 1989).

The lyricism of these descriptions proves the aesthetic power of the aerial view. But notice how apt the phrase "deus ex machina" is for these openings. The foreigner, citizen of privilege, descends via a sky crane "as though into an abyss." On the one level, such a description of a plane descending into night reflects the eerie beauty of the experience. On another level, Africa is being described as it always has been by Westerners, as a dark, unfathomable place that swallows what is human. Carol Spindel seems most aware of the inherent power of the view from above, calling it a form of "cheating." She acknowledges that she sees Africa as most Africans never do, "from the air." One other writer addresses the issue in her first sentence, but not so directly in terms of power. Elspeth Huxley admits in "Four Guineas" (1954) that the "most illuminating" way to travel in Africa is by bus and bicycle but that for reasons of "haste and comfort" she traveled by car and plane instead.

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