The Snows of Kilimanjaro

A hunter lies dying in Africa.

He has let his leg become infected through a simple scratch; his negligence has led to gangrene that is slowly spreading; an error on the part of his driver has rendered his jeep inoperable. Vultures fly overhead; a hyena circles, ever closer to the camp itself. Hemingway paints the picture of what it will be like to come to the end of life, and know that so many stories will remain unwritten. So many things left undone.

The hunter slips in and out of agitated sleep; remembering travel, accomplishments, battles, fistfights, whores, drinking; when he is awake, he quarrels with his wife; she continues to cling to the hope that a plane will come and save him; he concludes that the fight is lost, and that death has won. In his fever, the hunter recalls brawling in Constantinople; majestic skiing and companionship in Austria; wars fought in Europe; the pace and smell of the everyday in Paris. Ever closer, the vultures on the branch of a tree.

The text is not a Christian tale. There is no admonishment nor is there any discussion of heaven or hell. There is death, the unmistakable stench of a leg that is rotting. The quarrelsome dialogue never picks up a theme of absolution or redemption; there is simply “it came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness, and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it”

It is a remarkable story, full of the intense light of African plains. A narrative that weaves in and out of all of human weaknesses: racial slurs towards the native driver; sexual tension towards the spouse; despair towards hope itself.

A wonderful story to use when teaching: here we are far removed from the flat short sentences so characteristic of The Old Man and the Sea; how the rambling syntax is representative of our difficulties in trying to piece together the elements of troubled sleep, as we awake and try to recount, with confusion, what we have just been through.

How Hemingway creates a superb moment of real hesitation on the part of the reader: throughout the short story, he uses italics each time that the hunter is either in a cognitive or delusional or remembering mode, so as to mark the fact that the elements in these italic paragraphs can be taken as in his mind only. But at the end of the story, Hemingway traps the reader within this textual expectation: we read, in a non-italicised paragraph, that the hunter is being lifted by plane, banking towards the snow-capped mountain in the distance, and the hunter expresses a word of gratitude to the bush pilot. But all of this is chimera: the paragraph is a dream, the last the hunter has before death carries him away. But because it is not “announced by italics” as being a dream, we rejoice in his survival, only to understand ultimately that his body lies inert in the camp cot.

I cannot recall another short story that has the staying power of this one. How you return to it, again and again. Only several typed pages. But an extraordinary structure. The preface, of six short lines, is its haunting introduction:

“Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai, the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude”.

A very spiritual text, it is of course also a story about regret; the powerful and tragic question is asked roughly half-way through the narrative “what about the rest that he had never written?”. Hemingway committed suicide, in Idaho, in 1961, conscious that the Nobel Prize for Literature (awarded to him in 1954), was now part of his illustrious past, but that new texts were more difficult to write; that his vitality and creativity were ebbing away; that he did not want to be a diminished man. When he pulled the trigger and blew his brains out, at the early age of only 61, did he see for a fleeting instant the distant dream of a plane ascending towards the snows of a mountain?