Two revelations occur in Harry’s dream. The first and most obvious is that the dream reveals Harry’s imminent death, despite the details that suggest salvation. The second revelation is vaguely spiritual or mystical – that the final flight in the airplane away from Arusha and toward the peak of Kilimanjaro represents an ascent into the heavens, into the divine realm. With this in mind, the symbols in the dream start to make sense. In the first paragraph of the flight report, Harry is completely fixated on the ground, on the earthly and material. He studies it intensely – the movement of animals, the topography. Eventually, the plane rises high enough so that the ground is obscured – clouds create a hazy veil, a violent storm comes. The haze and storm represent the uncertain path the soul must thread during the period when death is approaching but the mind and body still cling to life, to the earth. Harry’s gaze is still cast down at this point—the ultimate goal, of course, being the safe landing of the plane at the hospital where a doctor can administer earthly salvation, perhaps by severing the gangrenous leg. When the storm clears, as the plane rises above the clouds, the pilot, Compie, instructs Harry to lift his vision from the earth to what lies above it – to the snow-clad peak of Kilimanjaro.  The peak is described in terms that lend it divine significance; it is “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun…” Harry then has the revelatory moment: “And then he knew that there was where he was going.” He is dying, to be sure, but this is not the ultimate meaning of the revelation here. The implication is that in dying he is bound for a place with spiritual significance – he is on his way to a higher place, another world, a pristine place like heaven. From a narrative point of view, the lack of clarity about whether this scene is really happening or whether it takes place in a dream works to create ambiguity about the trustworthiness of Harry’s revelation.

The final ambiguity about whether the ascent to heaven is a delusion or a true revelation fits with the overall tension in Hemingway’s story about Harry’s nature. Harry is at once a rakish figure and a moralist. He is a sybarite with the soul of an ascetic. He is a womanizer with the heart of a monogamist. He is warrior with the ideals of a pacifist and humanitarian. In this dream scene, he is revealed as being a great materialist – a great lover of all earthly things – and simultaneously a mystic, a man in search of a path to the metaphysical realm, a realm, fittingly in his case, symbolized by the pinnacle of earthly beauty. 

But Hemingway does not end with the plane coasting toward the mountain peak. He brings us back into the waking realm by means of another dreamer, Helen.

That the hyena’s cry announces Harry’s death is clear. But what should we make of the content of Helen’s dream? The dream provides an abrupt, if fleeting, glimpse into the upper-class world that so enthralled and repulsed Harry – a dynamic that was, ultimately, the motivation for his attempted escape to Africa and the cause of his death. This Long Island world is a space where feminized “performance” has replaced manly “reality.” It is a place of hierarchy and authority (father), governed by manners (being rude). Such a realm of comfort, hierarchy, order, norms, manners and superficiality offers a brilliant background to the image of the wailing (mourning? dying?) hyena – and reinforces Harry’s basic (though self-serving) conflict between a free and a caged existence.