Ernest Hemingway: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
American writer Ernest Hemingway wrote “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in 1938, following his involvement in World War I and the Spanish Civil War. By the 1930s, Hemingway was a famous writer, having already published some of his finest novels, short stories and essays over the preceding two decades, including his 1926 masterpiece, The Sun Also Rises. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” perhaps befitting a mature writer at Hemingway’s stage, is a reflective piece. The story centers on a writer named Harry, who has gone with his female companion, Helen, on an African safari in order to try to escape the stultifying effects of upper class society, into which Helen has brought him. At some point along the way, while setting up a camera to take a photograph of a herd of waterbuck Harry gets scratched in the leg by a thorn. The injury, at first nothing much, eventually becomes infected. Some weeks later, far from a hospital and without a means of transportation, Harry’s leg starts to rot. By the time the story begins it is nearly certain that Harry will die.
The story progresses over the course of an evening during which Harry slips back and forth between a rather trivial conversation with Helen and poignant memories of his past experiences. He comes to the central realization during these reflections that he has failed to write about the most important things in his life. He made a name for himself as a writer, Harry reproaches himself, but then got seduced by an upper-class lifestyle – a lifestyle that sucked his vitality and made him too lazy and indifferent to write about what really mattered. And what did matter? Real people doing real things – experiencing life, dealing with hardship, in short living through the raw historical moments. Instead of considering this, Harry surrendered to comfort, ease and drink. At turns, he blames himself and Helen – but ultimately he knows he has made his own life.
The evening turns to night. Helen and the servants prepare a broth, which Harry reluctantly consumes. Gradually, he is losing consciousness, losing his grip on the separation between reality and delusion, a loss which portends his coming death. Increasingly, Harry senses death’s approach. It is coming, like the gangrene, up his leg and finally he feels it pressing on his chest. At this moment, Harry loses consciousness and slips into a dream:
And then, while they lifted the cot, suddenly it was all right and the weight went from his chest.
It was morning and had been morning for some time and he heard the plane. It showed very tiny and then made a wide circle and the boys ran out and lit the fires, using kerosene, and piled on grass so there were two big smudges at each end of the level place and the morning breeze blew them toward the camp and the plane circled twice more, low this time, and then glided down and levelled off and landed smoothly and, coming walking toward him, was old Compton in slacks, a tweed jacket and a brown felt hat.
"What's the matter, old cock?" Compton said.
"Bad leg," he told him. "Will you have some breakfast?"
"Thanks. I'll just have some tea. It's the Puss Moth you know. I won't be able to take the Memsahib. There's only room for one. Your lorry is on the way."
Helen had taken Compton aside and was speaking to him. Compton came back more cheery than ever.
"We'll get you right in," he said. "I'll be back for the Mem. Now I'm afraid I'll have to stop at Arusha to refuel. We'd better get going."
"What about the tea?"
"I don't really care about it, you know."
The boys had picked up the cot and carried it around the green tents and down along the rock and out onto the plain and along past the smudges that were burning brightly now, the grass all consumed, and the wind fanning the fire, to the little plane. It was difficult getting him in, but once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg was stuck straight out to one side of the seat where Compton sat. Compton started the motor and got in. He waved to Helen and to the boys and, as the clatter moved into the old familiar roar, they swung around with Compie watching for warthog holes and roared, bumping, along the stretch between the fires and with the last bump rose and he saw them all standing below, waving, and the camp beside the hill, flattening now, and the plain spreading, clumps of trees, and the bush flattening, while the game trails ran now smoothly to the dry waterholes, and there was a new water that he had never known of. The zebra, small rounded backs now, and the wildebeeste, big-headed dots seeming to climb as they moved in long fingers across the plain, now scattering as the shadow came toward them, they were tiny now, and the movement had no gallop, and the plain as far as you could see, gray-yellow now and ahead old Compie's tweed back and the brown felt hat. Then they were over the first hills and the wildebeeste were trailing up them, and then they were over mountains with sudden depths of green-rising forest and the solid bamboo slopes, and then the heavy forest again, sculptured into peaks and hollows until they crossed, and hills sloped down and then another plain, hot now, and purple brown, bumpy with heat and Compie looking back to see how he was riding. Then there were other mountains dark ahead.
And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evidently figured that they had the gas, and looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the first snow in a blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts were coming, up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.
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