Exploring the Meaning of Place in 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'

Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" begins, "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 Mount Kilimanjaro are shrinking and will soon disappear entirely. It will be a shocking sight when the summit is no longer shrouded in white. For the local inhabitants, who have long held the mountain as a sacred place, the declining water supply from the snow melt will be a danger.

Indeed, this is still the norm for climbs of global tourists on Kilimanjaro.

The European explorations of the nineteenth century gave way to tourism of modern times, with its attendant benefits and harm.

- Landorossi Gate

One of the great appeals of climbing Kilimanjaro is passing through the five distinct ecological zones of the mountain: Bushland or Lower Slope, Rainforest, Heather or Moorland, Alpine Desert, and Arctic.

It is as if one is walking from high summer to deep winter in a few days.

This wide variety of ecosystems support a diversity of species. There are more than 1800 types of flowering plants growing in the volcanic soils: the famous groundsels (Senecio johnstonii), Protea kilimandscharica, Impatiens kilimanjari, and the fiery-red Gladiolus watsonioides.

As for fauna, Johnston saw three elephants at a height of 13,000 feet and Meyer reported seeing one on the slopes in 1889. There have been more recent sightings of leopards (professional climbers Rick Ridgeway and Geoffrey Salisbury).

Blue and colobus monkeys are most common at the forest level, but other mammals include olive baboons, civets, mongooses, badgers, bush babies, and servals. There are now reports that animals are being seen at higher and higher elevations. This is also true of birds: turaco, hornbills, robin chat, white-necked raven.

In 1926, a “dried and frozen carcass of a leopard” was found by Donald Latham and his guide Offoro in the Arctic region at approximately 18,500 feet. There is now a “Leopard Point” commemorating the spot on the crater rim. Latham is said to be the first Englishman to reach the peak and described this trek in a December 1926 article, “Kilimanjaro and Some Observations on the Physiology of High Altitudes in the Tropics", for the Geographical Journal.

Suffering from altitude sickness, Latham pushed “to attack” the summit (stating this was at 19,710 feet, possibly the source of Hemingway’s statistic in the epigraph) and reported “A remarkable discovery was the remains of a leopard, sun-dried and frozen, right at the crater rim. The beast must have wandered there and died of exposure. I built a small beacon and recorded my visit therein.” A photograph in the serial attests to the discovery.

An earlier typescript version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro had an epigraph from a woman adventurer and writer whom Hemingway admired. Rather than his own words, the opening was a quote from Vivienne de Watteville’s Speak to the Earth: Wanderings and Reflections among Elephants and Mountains (London, 1935). A fellow of The Royal Society (1900-1957) and Hemingway’s contemporary, she sought to climb Kilimanjaro and was told that success would depend “on one’s ability to withstand the high altitude.” Her book (with a little-noted preface by famous novelist Edith Wharton, of all people) ends in part one with a vision of the sunlit snows of Kilimanjaro. On the advice of Hemingway’s Esquire editor, the passage was dropped in favor of the lines apparently based on Meyer’s passage.

Yet another missionary in the story of European exploration, Richard Gustavovich Reusch (1891-1975), who climbed Kilimanjaro perhaps seventy-five times and whose name is commemorated in the inner crater of Kibo, cut off an ear of the poor leopard as a souvenir in 1926.

The German mountaineer Meyer returned to Mount Kilimanjaro ten years after his initial summit. There are astounding photographs that Meyer took of these expeditions, recording the snow and ice fields. Even then, he was shocked at how far the glaciers had receded in the intervening decade. Because of this, former Vice-President Al Gore was criticized for using the receding glaciers of Kilimanjaro at the beginning of the documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), as proof of global warming. However, there is significant scientific evidence that human activity and industry has greatly exacerbated the retreat of the glaciers, and not just the natural progression of snow on a volcano.

A complex combination of rising temperatures and humidity, decreasing precipitation, and changing cloud cover have led to a loss of more than 70 percent of the snow coverage since the mid- 1970s.

In addition, deforestation and encroaching farm lands, including coffee plantations, are said to have contributed to the lack of new snow pack.

A wonder of the world and a landscape of great spirituality, Mount Kilimanjaro will soon become a potent representation of climate change and human activity. Meyer described the splendor of coming upon the sight from the arid plains:

My troubles were all forgotten, however, when towards sunset the whole mountain for the first time unveiled itself from head to foot. … A more sublime spectacle could not be imagined than that on which we gazed entranced, as, that evening, the clouds parted and the mountain stood revealed in all its proud serenity. The south-west side of the great ice-dome blushed red in the splendor of the setting sun, while farther to the east the snows of the summit lay in deep blue shadow. Here and there the glistening, mysterious mantle was pierced by jagged points of dark-brown rock, as spots fleck the ermine of a king. And surely never monarch wore his royal robes more royally than this monarch of African mountains, Kilimanjaro. His foot rests on a carpet of velvety turf, and through the dark-green forest the steps of his throne reach downward to the earth, where man stands awestruck before the glory of his majesty. – Across East African Glaciers

These holdings (including a surprising number of fictional titles), telling stories of the historical layers of the landscape, will help to preserve what once was the awe-inspiring image of the white-draped mountain in equatorial Africa—the symbol of grace, of purity, in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro.