The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway : Summary

 

 

The narrative begins with an epigraph about Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, which is also called the “House of God.” There is a frozen dead body of a leopard at the highest point. No one knows why it is there.

 Harry the central character, a writer by profession dying of gangrene (a kind of bacterial infection which can cause the damage of body parts), and his rich wife Helen, who are on safari in Africa. Harry’s situation makes him irritable and short tempered, and he speaks about his own impending death in a matter-of fact he upsets his wife, predicting that a rescue plane will never come. He quarrels with her over everything. Helen is obviously concerned for his welfare, but she becomes unpleasant. Helen wishes they had never come on safari, and the two quarrel again, frustrated, Harry declares that he’s never loved Helen.

In a series of flashback he begins to recapture his life experiences. He feels that he has never reached his potential as a writer because he has chosen to make his living by marrying a wealthy woman. As a result he became largely indolent. Hemingway narrates the major parts of Harry’s experiences in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Harry’s early recollection was of traveling around Europe following a battle, hiding a deserter (run away army officer) in a cottage, hunting and skating in the mountains, playing cards during severe snowstorm, and hearing stories about a bombing run on a train full of Austrian officers.

 

Harry then falls asleep and wakes in the evening to find Helen returning from a shooting expedition. Now he feels that she is really thoughtful and a good wife to him. Helen, he remembers, is a rich widow who was bored by the series of lovers. But she married him because she admired his writing and they had some common interests.

Harry’s second memory sequence is about his experience with some  prostitutes in Constantinople (Turkey). Specifically, he had a fight with a British soldier over an Armenian prostitute and then left Constantinople for Anatolia (a place in Asian continent), where he ran from an army of Turkish soldiers. Later, he recalls that he returned to Paris then to his wife.

 

Helen and Harry have dinner, then he memorises yet another incident of burning down of his grandfather’s house. Later, he also thinks about an incident when an officer named Williamson was hit by a bomb and to whom Harry subsequently fed all his morphine tablets.

As Harry lies on his cot remembering, he feels the presence of death and associates it with a hyena that is running around the edge of the tent. He feels death is lying on his chest and is unable to speak.

Harry dreams that it is the next morning and that a man called Compton has come with a plane to rescue him. He is lifted onto the plane and watches the landscape go by beneath him. Suddenly, he sees the snow-covered top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Helen wakes up in the middle of the night to a strange hyena cry and sees Harry dead on his cot.