TheSnowsofKilimanjaro22byErnestHemingwayPDFFile.pdf

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Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa.
Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” 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.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

By Ernest Hemingway, 1938

THE MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT IT S painless,” he said. “Tha ‘s ho o kno
when it starts.”

“Is it really?”

“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you.”

“Don’t! Please don’t.”

“Look at them,” he said. “Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?”

The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past
the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely,
while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.

“They’ve been there since the day the truck broke down,” he said. “Today’s the first time
any have lit on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I
ever wanted to use them in a story. That’s funny now.””I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“I’m only talking,” he said. “It’s much easier if I talk. But I don’t want to bother you.”

“You know it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “It’s that I’ve gotten so very nervous not being
able to do anything. I think we might make it as easy as we can until the plane comes.”

“Or until the plane doesn’t come.”

“Please tell me what I can do. There must be something I can do.

“You can take the leg off and that might stop it, though I doubt it. Or you can shoot me.
You’re a good shot now. I taught you to shoot, didn’t I?”

“Please don’t talk that way. Couldn’t I read to you?”

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“Read what?”

“Anything in the book that we haven’t read.”

“I can’t listen to it,” he said.” Talking is the easiest. We quarrel and that makes the time
pass.”

“I don’t quarrel. I never want to quarrel. Let’s not quarrel any more. No matter how
nervous we get. Maybe they will be back with another truck today. Maybe the plane will
come.”

“I don’t want to move,” the man said. “There is no sense in moving now except to make it
easier for you.”

“That’s cowardly.”

“Can’t you let a man die as comfortably as he can without calling him names? What’s the
use of clanging me?”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m dying now. Ask those bastards.” He looked over to where the huge,
filthy birds sat, their naked heads sunk in the hunched feathers. A fourth planed down, to
run quick-legged and then waddle slowly toward the others.

“They are around every camp. You never notice them. You can’t die if you don’t give up.”

“Where did you read that? You’re such a bloody fool.”

“You might think about some one else.”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “that’s been my trade.”

He lay then and was quiet for a while and looked across the heat shimmer of the plain to
the edge of the bush. There were a few Tommies that showed minute and white against
the yellow and, far off, he saw a herd of zebra, white against the green of the bush. This
was a pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close by, a nearly
dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings.

“Wouldn’t you like me to read?” she asked. She was sitting on a canvas chair beside his
cot. “There’s a breeze coming up.

“No thanks.”

“Maybe the truck will come.”

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“I don’t give a damn about the truck.”

“I do.”

“You give a damn about so many things that I don’t.”

“Not so many, Harry.”

“What about a drink?”

“It’s supposed to be bad for you. It said in Black’s to avoid all alcohol.

You shouldn’t drink.”

“Molo!” he shouted.

“Yes Bwana.”

“Bring whiskey-soda.”

“Yes Bwana.”

“You shouldn’t,” she said. “That’s what I mean by giving up. It says it’s

bad for you. I know it’s bad for you.”

“No,” he said. “It’s good for me.”

So now it was all over, he thought. So now he would never have a chance

to finish it. So this was the way it ended, in a bickering over a drink. Since

the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the

horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end
of it. For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity.

For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was

strange how easy being tired enough made it.

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to
write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you

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could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well
he would never know, now.

“I wish we’d never come,” the woman said. She was looking at him holding the glass and
biting her lip. “You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said
you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I’d have gone
anywhere. I said I’d go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have gone
shooting in Hungary and been comfortable.”

“Your bloody money,” he said.

“That’s not fair,” she said. “It was always yours as much as mine. I left everything and I
went wherever you wanted to go and I’ve done what you wanted to do But I wish we’d
never come here.”

“You said you loved it.”

“I did when you were all right. But now I hate it. I don’t see why that had to happen to
your leg. What have we done to have that happen to us?”

“I suppose what I did was to forget to put iodine on it when I first scratched it. Then I
didn’t pay any attention to it because I never infect. Then, later, when it got bad, it was
probably using that weak carbolic solution when the other antiseptics ran out that
paralyzed the minute blood vessels and started the gangrene.” He looked at her, “What
else'”

“I don’t mean that.”

“If we would have hired a good mechanic instead of a half-baked Kikuyu driver, he would
have checked the oil and never burned out that bearing in the truck.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“If you hadn’t left your own people, your goddamned Old Westbury Saratoga, Palm
Beach people to take me on ” *’Why, I loved you. That’s not fair. I love you now. I’ll
always love you Don’t you love me?”

“No,” said the man. “I don’t think so. I never have.”

“Harry, what are you saying? You’re out of your head.”

“No. I haven’t any head to go out of.”

“Don’t drink that,” she said. “Darling, please don’t drink that. We have to do everything
we can.”

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“You do it,” he said. “I’m tired.”

Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack
and that was the headlight of the Simplon-Offent cutting the dark now and he was leaving
Thrace then after the retreat. That was one of the things he had saved to write, with, in
the morning at breakfast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the mountains in
Bulgaffa and Nansen’s Secretary asking the old man if it were snow and the old man
looking at it and saying, No, that’s not snow. It’s too early for snow. And the Secretary
repeating to the other girls, No, you see. It’s not snow and them all saying, It’s not snow
we were mistaken. But it was the snow all right and he sent them on into it when he
evolved exchange of populations. And it was snow they tramped along in until they died
that winter.

It was snow too that fell all Christmas week that year up in the Gauertal, that year they
lived in the woodcutter’s house with the big square porcelain stove that filled half the
room, and they slept on mattresses filled with beech leaves, the time the deserter came
with his feet bloody in the snow. He said the police were right behind him and they gave
him woolen socks and held the gendarmes talking until the tracks had drifted over.

In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow was so bright it hurt your eyes when you looked
out from the Weinstube and saw every one coming home from church. That was where
they walked up the sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed road along the river with the steep
pine hills, skis heavy on the shoulder, and where they ran down the glacier above the
Madlenerhaus, the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he
remembered the noiseless rush the speed made as you dropped down like a bird.

They were snow-bound a week in the Madlenerhaus that time in the blizzard playing
cards in the smoke by the lantern light and the stakes were higher all the time as Herr
Lent lost more. Finally he lost it all. Everything, the Skischule money and all the season’s
profit and then his capital. He could see him with his long nose, picking up the cards and
then opening, “Sans Voir.” There was always gambling then. When there was no snow
you gambled and when there was too much you gambled. He thought of all the time in his
life he had spent gambling.

But he had never written a line of that, nor of that cold, bright Christmas day with the
mountains showing across the plain that Barker had flown across the lines to bomb the
Austrian officers’ leave train, machine-gunning them as they scattered and ran. He
remembered Barker afterwards coming into the mess and starting to tell about it. And
how quiet it got and then somebody saying, ”You bloody murderous bastard.”

Those were the same Austrians they killed then that he skied with later. No not the same.
Hans, that he skied with all that year, had been in the Kaiser Jagers and when they went
hunting hares together up the little valley above the saw-mill they had talked of the
fighting on Pasubio and of the attack on Perticara and Asalone and he had never written
a word of that. Nor of Monte Corona, nor the Sette Communi, nor of Arsiero.

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How many winters had he lived in the Vorarlberg and the Arlberg? It was four and then
he remembered the man who had the fox to sell when they had walked into Bludenz, that
time to buy presents, and the cherry-pit taste of good kirsch, the fast-slipping rush of
running powder-snow on crust, singing ”Hi! Ho! said Rolly!’ ‘ as you ran down the last
stretch to the steep drop, taking it straight, then running the orchard in three turns and
out across the ditch and onto the icy road behind the inn. Knocking your bindings loose,
kicking the skis free and leaning them up against the wooden wall of the inn, the
lamplight coming from the window, where inside, in the smoky, new-wine smelling
warmth, they were playing the accordion.

“Where did we stay in Paris?” he asked the woman who was sitting by him in a canvas
chair, now, in Africa.

“At the Crillon. You know that.”

“Why do I know that?”

“That’s where we always stayed.”

“No. Not always.”

“There and at the Pavillion Henri-Quatre in St. Germain. You said you loved it there.”

“Love is a dunghill,” said Harry. “And I’m the cock that gets on it to crow.”

“If you have to go away,” she said, “is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you
leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your
horse, and your wife and burn your saddle and your armour?”

“Yes,” he said. “Your damned money was my armour. My Sword and my Armour.”

“Don’t.”

“All right. I’ll stop that. I don’t want to hurt you.’

“It’s a little bit late now.”

“All right then. I’ll go on hurting you. It’s more amusing. The only thing I ever really liked
to do with you I can’t do now.”

“No, that’s not true. You liked to do many things and everything you wanted to do I did.”

“Oh, for Christ sake stop bragging, will you?”

He looked at her and saw her crying.

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“Listen,” he said. “Do you think that it is fun to do this? I don’t know why I’m doing it. It’s
trying to kill to keep yourself alive, I imagine. I was all right when we started talking. I
didn’t mean to start this, and now I’m crazy as a coot and being as cruel to you as I can be.
Don’t pay any attention, darling, to what I say. I love you, really. You know I love you.
I’ve never loved any one else the way I love you.”

He slipped into the familiar lie he made his bread and butter by.

“You’re sweet to me.”

“You bitch,” he said. “You rich bitch. That’s poetry. I’m full of poetry now. Rot and
poetry. Rotten poetry.”

“Stop it. Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?”

“I don’t like to leave anything,” the man said. “I don like o lea e hings behind.”

* * *

It was evening now and he had been asleep. The sun was gone behind the hill and there
was a shadow all across the plain and the small animals were feeding close to camp; quick
dropping heads and switching tails, he watched them keeping well out away from the
bush now. The birds no longer waited on the ground. They were all perched heavily in a
tree. There were many more of them. His personal boy was sitting by the bed.

“Memsahib’s gone to shoot,” the boy said. “Does Bwana want?”

“Nothing.”

She had gone to kill a piece of meat and, knowing how he liked to watch the game, she
had gone well away so she would not disturb this little pocket of the plain that he could
see. She was always thoughtful, he thought. On anything she knew about, or had read, or
that she had ever heard.

It was not her fault that when he went to her he was already over. How could a woman
know that you meant nothing that you said; that you spoke only from habit and to be
comfortable? After he no longer meant what he said, his lies were more successful with
women than when he had told them the truth.

It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it
was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with
the best of the same places, and some new ones.

You kept from thinking and it was all marvellous. You were equipped with good insides
so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an
attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer

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do it. But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people; about the very
rich; that you were really not of them but a spy in their country; that you would leave it
and write of it and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was
writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being
that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he
did no work at all. The people he knew now were all much more comfortable when he did
not work. Africa was where he had been happiest in the good time of his life, so he had
come out here to start again. They had made this safari with the minimum of comfort.
There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and he had thought that he could get back
into training that way. That in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a
fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body.

She had liked it. She said she loved it. She loved anything that was exciting, that involved
a change of scene, where there were new people and where things were pleasant. And he
had felt the illusion of returning strength of will to work. Now if this was how it ended,
and he knew it was, he must not turn like some snake biting itself because its back was
broken. It wasn’t this woman’s fault. If it had not been she it would have been another. If
he lived by a lie he should try to die by it. He heard a shot beyond the hill.

She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his
talent. Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman
because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of
himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his
perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook
and by crook. What was this? A catalogue of old books? What was his talent anyway? It
was a talent all right but instead of using it, he had traded on it. It was never what he had
done, but always what he could do. And he had chosen to make his living with something
else instead of a pen or a pencil. It was strange, too, wasn’t it, that when he fell in love
with another woman, that woman should always have more money than the last one? But
when he no longer was in love, when he was only lying, as to this woman, now, who had
the most money of all, who had all the money there was, who had had a husband and
children, who had taken lovers and been dissatisfied with them, and who loved him dearly
as a writer, as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession; it was strange that when
he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her
money than when he had really loved.

We must all be cut out for what we do, he thought. However you make your living is
where your talent lies. He had sold vitality, in one form or another, all his life and when
your affections are not too involved you give much better value for the money. He had
found that out but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that,
although it was well worth writing.

Now she came in sight, walking across the open toward the camp. She was wearing
jodphurs and carrying her rifle. The two boys had a Tommie slung and they were coming
along behind her. She was still a good-looking woman, he thought, and she had a pleasant
body. She had a great talent and appreciation for the bed, she was not pretty, but he liked

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her face, she read enormously, liked to ride and shoot and, certainly, she drank too much.
Her husband had died when she was still a comparatively young woman and for a while
she had devoted herself to her two just-grown children, who did not need her and were
embarrassed at having her about, to her stable of horses, to books, and to bottles. She
liked to read in the evening before dinner and she drank Scotch and soda while she read.
By dinner she was fairly drunk and after a bottle of wine at dinner she was usually drunk
enough to sleep.

That was before the lovers. After she had the lovers she did not drink so much because
she did not have to be drunk to sleep. But the lovers bored her. She had been married to a
man who had never bored her and these people bored her very much.

Then one of her two children was killed in a plane crash and after that was over she did
not want the lovers, and drink being no anaesthetic she had to make another life.
Suddenly, she had been acutely frightened of being alone. But she wanted some one that
she respected with her.

It had begun very simply. She liked what he wrote and she had always envied the life he
led. She thought he did exactly what he wanted to. The steps by which she had acquired
him and the way in which she had finally fallen in love with him were all part of a regular
progression in which she had built herself a new life and he had traded away what
remained of his old life.

He had traded it for security, for comfort too, there was no denying that, and for what
else? He did not know. She would have bought him anything he wanted. He knew that.
She was a damned nice woman too. He would as soon be in bed with her as any one;
rather with her, because she was richer, because she was very pleasant and appreciative
and because she never made scenes. And now this life that she had built again was
coming to a term because he had not used iodine two weeks ago when a thorn had
scratched his knee as they moved forward trying to photograph a herd of waterbuck
standing, their heads up, peering while their nostrils searched the air, their ears spread
wide to hear the first noise that would send them rushing into the bush. They had bolted,
too, before he got the picture.

Here she came now. He turned his head on the cot to look toward her. “Hello,” he said.

“I shot a Tommy ram,” she told him. “He’ll make you good broth and I’ll have them mash
some potatoes with the Klim. How do you feel?”

“Much better.”

“Isn’t that lovely? You know I thought perhaps you would. You were sleeping when I
left.”

“I had a good sleep. Did you walk far?”

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“No. Just around behind the hill. I made quite a good shot on the Tommy.”

“You shoot marvellously, you know.”

“I love it. I’ve loved Africa. Really. If you’re all right it’s the most fun that I’ve ever had.
You don’t know the fun it’s been to shoot with you. I’ve loved the country.”

“I love it too.”

“Darling, you don’t know how marvellous it is to see you feeling better. I couldn’t stand it
when you felt that way. You won’t talk to me like that again, will you? Promise me?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t remember what I said.”

“You don’t have to destroy me. Do you? I’m only a middle-aged woman who loves you
and wants to do what you want to do. I’ve been destroyed two or three times already. You
wouldn’t want to destroy me again, would you?”

“I’d like to destroy you a few times in bed,” he said.

“Yes. That’s the good destruction. That’s the way we’re made to be destroyed. The plane
will be here tomorrow.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m sure. It’s bound to come. The boys have the wood all ready and the grass to make the
smudge. I went down and looked at it again today. There’s plenty of room to land and we
have the smudges ready at both ends.”

“What makes you think it will come tomorrow?”

“I’m sure it will. It’s overdue now. Then, in town, they will fix up your leg and then we
will have some good destruction. Not that dreadful talking kind.”

“Should we have a drink? The sun is down.”

“Do you think you should?”

“I’m having one.”

“We’ll have one together. Molo, letti dui whiskey-soda!” she called.

“You’d better put on your mosquito boots,” he told her.

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“I’ll wait till I bathe . . .”

While it grew dark they drank and just before it was dark and there was no longer enough
light to shoot, a hyena crossed the open on his way around the hill.

“That bastard crosses there every night,” the man said. “Every night for two weeks.”

“He’s the one makes the noise at night. I don’t mind it. They’re a filthy animal though.”

Drinking together, with no pain now except the discomfort of lying in the one position,
the boys lighting a fire, its shadow jumping on the tents, he could feel the return of
acquiescence in this life of pleasant surrender. She was very good to him. He had been
cruel and unjust in the afternoon. She was a fine woman, marvellous really. And just then
it occurred to him that he was going to die.

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.

“What is it, Harry?” she asked him.

“Nothing,” he said. “You had better move over to the other side. To windward.”

“Did Molo change the dressing?”

“Yes. I’m just using the boric now.”

“How do you feel?”

“A little wobbly.”

“I’m going in to bathe,” she said. “I’ll be right out. I’ll eat with you and then we’ll put the
cot in.”

So, he said to himself, we did well to stop the quarrelling. He had never quarrelled much
with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarrelled so much they had
finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarrelling, killed what they had together. He
had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.

He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarrelled in Paris before he
had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had
failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the
one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it … How when he
thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside,
and that he would follow a woman who looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard,
afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had
slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter

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since he knew he could not cure himself of loving her. He wrote this letter at the Club,
cold sober, and mailed it to New York asking her to write him at the of fice in Paris. That
seemed safe. And that night missing her so much it made him feel hollow sick inside, he
wandered up past Maxim’s, picked a girl up and took her out to supper. He had gone to a
place to dance with her afterward, she danced badly, and left her for a hot Armenian slut,
that swung her belly against him so it almost scalded. He took her away from a British
gunner subaltern after a row. The gunner asked him outside and they fought in the street
on the cobbles in the dark. He’d hit him twice, hard, on the side of the jaw and when he
didn’t go down he knew he was in for a fight. The gunner hit him in the body, then beside
his eye. He swung with his left again and landed and the gunner fell on him and grabbed
his coat and tore the sleeve off and he clubbed him twice behind the ear and then smashed
him with his right as he pushed him away. When the gunner went down his head hit first
and he ran with the girl because they heard the M.P. ‘s coming. They got into a taxi and
drove out to Rimmily Hissa along the Bosphorus, and around, and back in the cool night
and went to bed and she felt as over-ripe as she looked but smooth, rose-petal, syrupy,
smooth-bellied, big-breasted and needed no pillow under her buttocks, and he left her
before she was awake looking blousy enough in the first daylight and turned up at the
Pera Palace with a black eye, carrying his coat because one sleeve was missing.

That same night he left for Anatolia and he remembered, later on that trip, riding all day
through fields of the poppies that they raised for opium and how strange it made you feel,
finally, and all the distances seemed wrong, to where they had made the attack with the
newly arrived Constantine officers, that did not know a god-damned thing, and the
artillery had fired into the troops and the British observer had cried like a child.

That was the day he’d first seen dead men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes
with pompons on them. The Turks had come steadily and lumpily and he had seen the
skirted men running and the of ficers shooting into them and running then themselves and
he and the British observer had run too until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of the
taste of pennies and they stopped behind some rocks and there were the Turks coming as
lumpily as ever. Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he
had seen much worse. So when he got back to Paris that time he could not talk about it or
stand to have it mentioned. And there in the cafe as he passed was that American poet
with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the
Dada movement with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara, who always
wore a monocle and had a headache, and, back at the apartment with his wife that now
he loved again, the quarrel all over, the madness all over, glad to be home, the office sent
his mail up to the flat. So then the letter in answer to the one he’d written came in on a
platter one morning and when he saw the hand writing he went cold all over and tried to
slip the letter underneath …