Read Like A Writer

There are two ways to learn how to write fiction: by reading it and by writing it. Yes, you can learn lots about writing stories in workshops, in writing classes and writing groups, at writers' conferences. You can learn technique and process by reading the dozens of books like this one on fiction writing and by reading articles in writers' magazines. But the best teachers of fiction are the great works of fiction themselves. You can learn more about the structure of a short story by reading Anton Chekhov's 'Heartache' than you can in a semester of Creative Writing 101. If you read like a writer, that is, which means you have to read everything twice, at least. When you read a story or novel the first time, just let it happen. Enjoy the journey. When you've finished, you know where the story took you, and now you can go back and reread, and this time notice how the writer reached that destination. Notice the choices he made at each chapter, each sentence, each word. (Every word is a choice.) You see now how the transitions work, how a character gets across a room. All this time you're learning. You loved the central character in the story, and now you can see how the writer presented the character and rendered her worthy of your love and attention. The first reading is creative—you collaborate with the writer in making the story. The second reading is critical.


John Dufresne, from his book, The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

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Showing posts with label Ernest Hemingway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ernest Hemingway. Show all posts

Friday, May 19, 2023

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea

 

by Ernest Hemingway


The Old Man and the Sea is a novella written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cayo Blanco (Cuba), and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction written by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba. Wikipedia


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Thursday, May 18, 2023

The Killers by Ernest Hemingway

The Killers by Ernest Hemingway

The Killers by Ernest Hemingway


"The Killers" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, published in Scribner's Magazine in 1927. After its appearance in Scribner's, the story was published in Men Without Women, Snows of Kilimanjaro, and The Nick Adams Stories. The writer's depiction of the human experience, his use of satire, and the everlasting themes of death, friendship, and the purpose of life have contributed to make "The Killers" one of Hemingway's most famous and frequently anthologized short stories.

The story features Nick Adams, a famous Hemingway character from his short stories. In this story, Hemingway shows Adams crossing over from teenager to adult. The basic plot of the story involves two hitmen who enter a restaurant seeking to kill a boxer, a Swede named Ole Andreson, who is hiding out for reasons unknown, possibly for winning a fight.

Historians have some documents showing that the working title of the piece was "The Matadors".

How much Hemingway received for the literary piece is unknown, but some sources state it was $200. Wikipedia 


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Thursday, April 7, 2022

The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway

 

The Sun Also Rises Novel by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, his first, that portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. However, Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work", and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner's. A year later, Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print. Wikipedia 

 

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature. Wikipedia

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Monday, March 21, 2022

Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway

Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway

Hills Like White Elephants 

by Ernest Hemingway

 

"Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in August 1927, in the literary magazine transition, then later in the 1927 short story collection Men Without Women. Wikipedia



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Monday, April 10, 2017

Ernest Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory” or "Theory of Omission" of Writing

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

 –Ernest Hemingway



Writing Books Index

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Big Two-Hearted River by Ernest Hemingway

Word Count: 8,021

PART I

The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.

Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.

Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. He turned and looked down the stream. It stretched away, pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boulders and a deep pool as it curved away around the foot of a bluff.

Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line Still, it was too heavy. It was much too heavy. He had his leather rod-case in his hand and leaning forward to keep the weight of the pack high on his shoulders he walked along the road that paralleled the railway track, leaving the burned town behind in the heat, and shell turned off around a hill with a high, fire-scarred hill on either side onto a road that went back into the country. He walked along the road feeling, the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for  thinking, the need to write, other needs, It was all back of him. 

From the time he had gotten down off the train and the baggage man had thrown his pack out of the open car door things had been different Seney was burned, the country was burned over and changed, but it did not matter. It could not all be burned that. He hiked along the road, sweating in the sun, climbing  to cross the range of hills that separated the railway from the pine plains.

The road ran on, dipping occasionally, but always climbing hill. He went pm up Finally the road after going parallel to the burnt hill he reached the top. Nick leaned back against a stump and slipped out of the pack harness. Ahead of him, as far as he could see, was the pine plain. The burned country stopped of off at the left pith the range of hills. 011 ahead islands of dark pine trees rose out of the plain Far off to the left was the line of the river. Nick followed it with his eye and caught glints of the water in the sun.    

There was nothing but the pine plain ahead of him, until the far blue hills that marked the Lake Superior height of land. He could hardly see them faint and far away in the heat-light over the plain. If he looked too steadily they were gone. But if he only half-looked they were there, the far-off hills of the height of land.

Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on the top of the stump harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.

As he smoked his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock. The grasshopper was black. As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started  grasshoppers from with dust. They were all black They were not the big grasshoppers with yellow and black or red and black wings whirring out from their black wing sheathing as they fly up. These were just ordinary hoppers, but all a sooty black in color. Nick had wondered about them as he walked without really thinking about them. Now, as he watched the black hopper that was nibbling at the wool of his sock with its fourway lip he realized that they had all turned black from living in the I burned-over land. He realized that the fire must have come the year before, but the grasshoppers were all black now. He wondered how long they would stay that way.

Carefully he reached his hand down and took hold of the hopper by the wings. He turned him up, all his legs walking in the air, and looked at his jointed belly. Yes, it was black too, iridescent where the back and head were dusty.

"Go on, hopper," Nick said, speaking out loud for the first time "Fly away somewhere."

He tossed the grasshopper up into the air and watched him sail away to a charcoal stump across the road.

Nick stood up. He leaned his back against the weight of his pack where it rested upright on the stump and got his arms through the shoulder straps. He stood with the pack on his back on the brow of the hill looking out across the country, toward the distant river and then struck down the hillside away from the road. Underfoot the ground was good walking. Two hundred yards down the fire line stopped. Then it was sweet fern, growing ankle high, walk through, and clumps of jack pines; a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot and the country alive again.

Nick kept his direction by the sun. He knew where he wanted to strike the river and he kept on through the pine plain, mounting small rises to see other rises ahead of him and sometimes from the top of a rise a great solid island of pines off to his right or his left He broke off some sprigs of the Leathery sweet fern, and put them under his pack straps. The chafing crushed it and he smelled it as he walked.

He was tired and very hot, walking across the uneven, shadeless pine pram. At any time he knew he could strike the river by turning of f to his left It could not be more than a mile away. But he kept on toward the north to hit the river as far upstream as he could go in one day's walking. For some time as he walked Nick had been in sight of one of the big islands of pine standing out above the rolling high ground he was crossing. He dipped down and then as he came slowly up to the crest of the bridge he turned and made toward the pine trees. There was no underbrush in the island of pine trees. The trunks of the trees went straight up or slanted toward each other. The trunks were straight and brown without branches. The branches were high above. Some interlocked to make a solid shadow on the brown forest floor. Around the grove of trees was a bare space. It was brown   and salt underfoot as Nick walked on it. This was the over-lapping of the pine   needle floor, extending out beyond the width of the high branches. The trees   had grown tall and the branches moved high, leaving in the sun this bare   space they had once covered with shadow. Sharp at the edge of this extension   of the forest floor commenced the sweet fern.     

Nick slipped off his pack and lay down in the shade. He lay on his back and   looked up into the pine trees. His neck and back and the small of his back   rested as he stretched. The earth felt good against his back. He looked up at   the sky, through the branches, and then shut his eyes. He opened them and   looked up again. There was a wind high up in the branches. He shut his eyes   again and went to sleep.     

Nick woke stiff and cramped. The sun was nearly down. His pack was heavy   and the straps painful as he lifted it on. He leaned over with the pack on and   picked up the leather rod-case and started out from the pine trees across the   sweet fern swale, toward the river. He knew it could not be more than a mile.     

He came down a hillside covered with stumps into a meadow. At the edge of   the meadow flowed the river. Nick was glad to get to the river. He walked   upstream through the meadow. His trousers were soaked with the dew as he   walked. After the hot day, the dew halt come quickly and heavily. The river made no sound. It was too fast and smooth. At the edge of the meadow,   before he mounted to a piece of high ground to make camp, Nick looked   down the river at the trout rising. They were rising to insects come from the   swamp on the other side of the stream when the sun went down. The trout   jumped out of water to take them. While Nick walked through the little   stretch of meadow alongside the stream, trout had jumped high out of water.   Now as he looked down the river, the insects must be settling on the surface,   for the trout were feeding steadily all down the stream. As far down the long   stretch as he could see, the trout were rising, making circles all down the   surface of the water, as though it were starting to rain.     

The ground rose, wooded and sandy, to overlook the meadow, the stretch of   river and the swamp. Nick dropped his pack and rod case and looked for a   level piece of ground. He was very hungry and he wanted to make his camp   before he cooked. Between two jack pines, the ground was quite level. He   took the ax out of the pack and chopped out two projecting roots. That   leveled a piece of ground large enough to sleep on. He smoothed out the   sandy soil with his hand and pulled all the sweet fern bushes by their   roots. His hands smelled good from the sweet fern. He smoothed the uprooted   earth. He did not want anything making lumps under the blankets. When he had the ground smooth, he spread his  blankets. One he folded double, next to the ground. The other two he spread on top.     

With the ax he slit off a bright slab of pine from one of the stumps and split it   into pegs for the tent. He wanted them long and solid to hold in the ground.   With the tent unpacked and spread on the ground, the pack, leaning against a   jackpine, looked much smaller Nick tied the rope that served the tent for a   ridge-pole to the trunk of one of the pine trees and pulled the tent up off the   ground with the other end of the rope and tied it to the other pine. The tent   hung on the rope like a canvas blanket on a clothesline. Nick poked a pole he   had cut up under the back peak of the canvas and then made it a tent by   pegging out the sides. He pegged the sides out taut and drove the pegs deep,   hitting them down into the ground with the feat of the ax until the rope loops   were buried and the canvas was drum tight.     

Across the open mouth of the tent Nick fixed cheesecloth to keep out   mosquitoes. He crawled inside under the mosquito bar with various things   from the pack to put at the head of the bed under the slant of the canvas.   Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. It smelled pleasantly   of canvas. Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was   happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This   was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now   it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He   had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good   place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he   had made it. Now he was hungry.     

He came out, crawling under the cheesecloth. It was quite dark outside. It   was lighter in the tent.     

Nick went over to the pack and found, with his fingers, a long nail in a paper sack of nails, in the bottom of the pack. He drove it into the pine tree, holding   it close and hitting it gently with the flat of the ax. He hung the pack up on the   nail. All his supplies were in the pack. They were off the ground and sheltered now.     

Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier He opened   and emptied a can at pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan.     

"I've got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I'm willing to carry it, Nick said.  

His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.     

He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump.   Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the tour legs down into the ground   with his boot. Nick put the frying pan and a can of spaghetti on the grill over   the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred   them sad mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles   that rose with difficulty to the surface- There was a good smell. Nick got out   a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles   were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying   pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread   slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato   catchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the   fire, then at the tent, he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue. For   years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool. His   tongue was very sensitive. He was very hungry. Across the river in the   swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent   once more. All right. He took a full spoonful from the plate.      "Chrise," Nick said, "Geezus Chrise," he said happily.     

He ate the whole plateful before he remembered the bread. Nick finished the   second plateful with the bread, mopping the plate shiny. He had not eaten   since a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich in the station restaurant at St.   Ignace. It had been a very fine experience. He had been that hungry before,  but had not been able to sat- it. He could have made camp hours before if he   had wanted to. There were plenty of good places to camp on the river. But   this was good.     

Nick tucked two big chips of pine under the grill. The fire flared up. He had   forgotten to get water for the coffee. Out of the pack he got a folding canvas   bucket and walked down the hill, across the edge of the meadow, to the   stream. The other bank was in the white mist. The grass was wet and cold as   he knelt on the bank and dipped the canvas bucket into the stream. It bellied   and pulled held in the current. The water was ice cold. Nick rinsed the bucket   and carried it full up to the camp. Up away from the stream it was not so   cold.     

Nick drove another big nail and hung up the bucket full of water. He dipped   the coffee pot half full, put some more chips under the grill onto the fire and   put the pot oil. He could not remember which way he made coffee. He could   remember an argument about it with Hopkins, but not which side he had   taken. He decided to bring it to a boil. He remembered now that was   Hopkins's way. He had once argued about everything with Hopkins. While he  waited for the coffee to boil, he opened a small can of apricots. He liked to  open cans. He emptied the can of apricots out into a tin cup. While he   watched the coffee on the fire, he drank the Juice syrup of the apricots,   carefully at first to keep from spilling, then meditatively, sucking the apricots   down. They were better than fresh apricots.     

The coffee boiled as he watched. The lid came up and coffee and grounds ran   down the side of the pot. Nick took it off the grill. It was a triumph for   Hopkins. He put sugar in the empty apricot cup and poured some of the   coffee out to cool. It was too hot to pour and he used his hat to hold the   handle of the coffee pot. He would not let it steep in the  pot at all. Not the   first cup. It should be straight Hopkins all the Hop deserved that. was a very   serious coffee drinker. He was the most serious man Nick had ever known.   Not heavy, serious. That was a long time ago Hopkins spoke without moving   his lips. He had played polo. He made millions of dollars in Texas. He had   borrowed carfare to go to Chicago, when the wire came that his first big well   had come in. He could have wired for money. That' would have been too slow. They called Hop's girl the Blonde Venus. Hop did not mind because she   was not his real girl, Hopkins said very confidently that none of them would   make fun of his real girl. He was right. Hopkins went away when the telegram came. That was on the Black River. It took eight days for the telegram to reach him. Hopkins gave away his 22 caliber Colt automatic pistol to Nick.   He gave his camera to Bill, It was to remember him always by. They were all   going fishing again next summer. The Hop Head was rich. He would get a   yacht and they would all cruise along the north shore of Lake Superior. He   was excited but serious. They said good-bye and all felt bad. It broke up the trip. They never saw Hopkins again.. That was a long time ago on the Black   River.     

Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter   Nick laughed.   It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the   coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a   cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting   on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in   between the blankets.     

Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the   night wind blew.  It was a quiet night The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick   stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his   ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his   head Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a   satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under   the blanket. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt   sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep. 
                                                                                      
 PART II

In the morning the sun was up and the tent was starting to get hot. Nick   crawled out under the mosquito netting stretched across the mouth of the   tent, to look at the morning. The grass was wet on his hands as he came out.   The sun was just up over the hill. There was the meadow, the river and the   swamp. There were birch trees in the green of the swamp on the other side of   the river.     

The river was clear and smoothly fast in the early morning. Down about two   hundred yards were three logs all the way across the stream. They made the   water smooth and deep above them. As Nick watched, a mink crossed the   river on the logs and went into the swamp. Nick was excited. He was excited   by the early morning and the river. He was really too hurried to eat breakfast,   but he knew he must. He built a little fire and put on the coffee pot.     

While the water was heating in the pot he took an empty bottle and went   down over the edge of the high ground to the meadow. The meadow was wet   with dew and Nick wanted to catch grasshoppers for bait before the sun dried   the grass. He found plenty of good grasshoppers. They were at the base of the   grass stems.  Sometimes they clung to a grass stems. They were cold and wet   with the dew, and could not jump until the sun warmed them. Nick picked   them up, taking only the medium-sized brown ones, and put them into the   bottle. He turned over a log and just under the shelter of the edge were   several hundred hoppers. It was a grasshopper lodging house. Nick put about   fifty of the medium browns into the bottle. While he was picking up the   hoppers the others warmed in the sun and commenced to hop away. They   flew when they hopped. At first they made one flight and stayed stiff when   they landed, as though they were dead.     

Nick knew that by the time he was through with breakfast they would be as   lively as ever. Without dew in the grass it would take him all day to catch a   bottle full of good grasshoppers and he would have to crush many of them,   slamming at them with his hat. He washed his hands at the stream. He was   excited to be near it. Then he walked up to the tent. The hoppers were   already jumping stiffly in the grass. In the bottle, warmed by the sun, they   were jumping in a mass. Nick put in a pine stick as a cork. It plugged the   mouth of the bottle enough, so the hoppers could not get out and left plenty of   air passage.     

He had rolled the log back and knew he could get grasshoppers there every  
morning.     

Nick laid the bottle full of jumping grasshoppers against a pine trunk. Rapidly   he mixed some buckwheat flour with water and stirred it smooth, one cup of   flour, one cup of water. He put a handful of coffee in the pot and dipped a   lump of grease out of a can and slid it sputtering across the hot skillet. The   smoking skillet he poured smoothly the buckwheat batter. It spread like lava,   the grease spitting sharply. Around the edges the buckwheat cake began to   firm, then brown, then crisp. The surface was bubbling slowly to porousness.   Nick pushed under the browned under surface with a fresh pine chip. He   shook the skillet sideways and the cake was loose on the surface. I won't try   and flop it, he thought. He slid the chip of clean wood all the way under the   cake, and flopped it over onto its face. It sputtered in the pan.     

When it was cooked Nick regreased the skillet. He used all the batter. It made   another big flapjack and one smaller one.     

Nick ate a big flapjack and a smaller one, covered with apple butter. He put   apple butter on the third cake, folded it over twice, wrapped it in oiled paper  and put it in his shirt pocket. He put the apple butter jar back in the pack and   cut bread for two sandwiches.     

In the pack he found a big onion. He sliced it in two and peeled the silky   outer skin. Then he cut one half into slices and made onion sandwiches. He   wrapped them in oiled paper and buttoned them in the other pocket of his   khaki shirt. He turned the skillet upside down on the grill, drank the coffee,   sweetened and yellow brown with the condensed milk in it, and tidied up the   camp. It was a good camp.     

Nick took his fly rod out of the leather rod-case, jointed it, and shoved the   rod-case back into the tent. He put on the reel and threaded the line through   the guides. He had to hold it from hand to hand, as he threaded it, or it would   slip back through its own weight. It was a heavy, double tapered fly line.   Nick had paid eight dollars for it a long time ago. It was made heavy to lift   back in the air and come forward flat and heavy and straight to make it   possible to cast a fly which has no weight. Nick opened the aluminum leader   box. The leaders were coiled between the damp flannel pads. Nick had wet   the pads at the water cooler on the train up to St. Ignace. In the damp pads   the gut leaders had softened and Nick unrolled one and tied it by a loop at the   end to the heavy fly line. He fastened a hook on the end of the leader. It was a   small hook; very thin and springy.      

Nick took it from his hook book, sitting with the rod across his lap. He tested   the knot and the spring of the rod by pulling the line taut. It was a good   feeling. He was careful not to let the hook bite into his finger.     

He started down to the stream, holding his rod, the bottle of grasshoppers   hung from his neck by a thong tied in half hitches around the neck of the   bottle. His landing net hung by a hook from his belt. Over his shoulder was a   long flour sack tied at each corner into an ear. The cord went over his   shoulder. The sack slapped against his legs.     

Nick felt awkward and professionally happy with all his equipment hanging:   from him. The grasshopper bottle swung against his chest. In his shirt the   breast pockets bulged against him with the lunch and the fly book.     

He stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung tight to his legs.   His shoes felt the gravel. The water was a rising cold shock.     

Rushing, the current sucked against his legs. Where he stepped in, the water   was over his knees. He waded with the current. The gravel slipt under his   shoes. He looked down at the swirl of water below each leg and tipped up the   bottle to get a grasshopper.      The first grasshopper gave a jump in the neck of the bottle and went out into   the water. He was sucked under in the whirl by Nick's right leg and came to   the surface a little way down stream. He floated rapidly, kicking. In a quick   circle, breaking the smooth surface of the water, he disappeared. A trout had   taken him.     

Another hopper poked his face out of the bottle. His antennas wavered.  He   was getting his front legs out of the bottle to jump. Nick took him by the   head and held him while he threaded the slim hook under his chin, down   through his thorax and into the last segments of his abdomen. The   grasshopper took hold of the hook with his front feet, spitting tobacco juice   on it. Nick dropped him into the water.     

Holding the rod in his right hand he let out line against the pull of the   grasshopper in the current. He stripped off line from the reel with his left hand   and let it run free. He could see the hopper in the little waves of the current. It   went out of sight.     

There was a tug on the line. Nick pulled against the taut line. It was his first   strike. Holding the now living rod across the current, he hauled in the line   with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, the trout pulling against the   current. Nick knew it was a small one. He lifted the rod straight up in the air.   It bowed with the pull.     

He saw the trout in the water jerking with his head and body against the   shifting tangent of the line in the stream.     

Nick took the line in his left hand and pulled the trout, thumping tiredly   against the current, to the surface. His back was mottled the clear, water-over-   gravel color, his side flashing in the sun. The rod under his right arm, Nick   stooped, dipping his right hand into the current. He held the trout, never still,   with his moist right hand, while he unhooked the barb from his mouth, then   dropped him back into the stream.     

He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside a stone.   Nick reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the elbow under water.   The trout was steady in the moving stream resting on the gravel, beside a   stone. As Nick's fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool, underwater   feeling, he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the stream.     

He's all right, Nick thought. He was only tired.     

He had wet his hand before he touched the trout, so he would not disturb the   delicate mucus that covered him.  If a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot. Years before when he had fished crowded streams, with fly fishermen ahead of him and behind  him, Nick had again and again come on dead trout furry with white fungus, drilled against a rock, or floating belly up in some pool. Nick did not like to fish with other men on the river. Unless they were of your party, they spoiled it.     

He wallowed down the steam, above his knees in the current, through the fifty   yards of shallow water above the pile of logs that crossed the stream. He did   not rebait his hook and held it in his hand as he waded. He was certain he   could catch small trout in the shallows, but he did not want them. There   would be no big trout in the shallows this time of day.     

Now the water deepened up his thighs sharply and coldly. Ahead was the   smooth dammed-back flood of water above the logs. The water was smooth   and dark; on the left, the lower edge of the meadow; on the right the swamp.      Nick leaned back against the current and took a hopper from the bottle. He   threaded the hopper on the hook and spat on him for good luck. Then he   pulled several yards of line from the reel and tossed the hopper out ahead   onto the fast, dark water. It floated down towards the logs, then the weight of   the line pulled the bait under the surface Nick held the rod in his right hand,   letting the line run out through his fingers.     

There was a long tug. Nick struck and the rod came alive and dangerous,   bent double, the line tightening, coming out of water, tightening, all in a   heavy, dangerous, steady pull. Nick felt the moment when the leader would   break if the strain increased and let the line go.     

The reel ratcheted into a mechanical shriek as the line went out in a rush. Too   fast. Nick could not check it, the line rushing out, the reel note rising as the line ran out.      With the core of the reel showing, his heart feeling stopped with the   excitement, leaning back against the current that mounted icily his thighs,   Nick thumbed the reel hard with his left hand. It was awkward getting his   thumb inside the fly reel frame.     

As he put on pressure the line tightened into sudden hardness and beyond the   logs a huge trout went high out of water. As he jumped, Nick lowered the tip   of the rod. But he felt, as he dropped the tip to ease the strain, the moment when the strain was too great; the hardness too tight. Of course, the leader had broken. There was no mistaking the feeling when all spring left the line and it became dry and hard. Then it went slack.

His mouth dry, his heart down, Nick reeled in. He had never seen so big a trout.  There was a heaviness, a power not to be held, and then the bulk of him, as he jumped. He looked as broad as a salmon.

Nick's hand was shaky. He reeled in slowly. The thrill had been too muchl. He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down. 

The leader had broken where the hook was tied to it. Nick took it in his hand. He thought of the trout somewhere on the bottom, holding himself steadyover the gravel, far down below the light, under the logs, with the hook in his   jaw. Nick knew the trout's teeth would cut through the snell of the hook. The   hook would imbed itself in his jaw. He'd bet the trout was angry. Anything   that size would be angry. That was a trout. He had been solidly hooked. Solid   as a rock. He felt like a rock, too, before he started off. By God, he was a big one. By God, he was the biggest one I ever heard of.     

Nick climbed out onto the meadow and stood, water running down his   trousers and out of his shoes, his shoes squlchy. He went over and sat on the   logs. He did not want to rush his sensations any.     

He wriggled his toes in the water, in his shoes, and got out a cigarette from   his breast pocket. He lit it and tossed the match into the I:ast water below the   logs. A tiny trout rose at the match, as it swung around in the fast current.   Nick laughed. He would finish the cigarette.     

He sat on the logs, smoking, drying in the sun, the sun warm on his back,   the river shallow ahead entering the woods, curving into the woods, shallows,   light glittering, big water-smooth rocks, cedars along the bank and white   birches, the logs warm in the sun, smooth to sit on, without bark, gray to the   touch; slowly the feeling of disappointment left him. It went away slowly, the   feeling of disappointment that came sharply after the thrill that made his   shoulders Iche. It was all right now. His rod lying out on the logs, Nick  tied a new hook on the leader, pulling the gut tight until it crimped into itself  in a hard knot.     

He baited up, then picked up the rod and walked to the tar end of the logs to   get into the water, where it was not too deep. Under and beyond the logs was   a deep pool. Nick walked around the shallow shelf near the swamp shore until   he came out on the shallow bed of the stream.     

On the left, where the meadow ended and the woods began, a great elm tree   was uprooted. Gone over in a storm, it lay back into the woods, its roots   clotted with dirt, grass growing in them, rising a solid bank beside the stream.   The river cut to the edge of the uprooted tree. From where Nick stood he   could see deep channels like ruts, cut in the shallow bed of the stream by the   flow of the current. Pebbly where he stood and pebbly and full of boulders   beyond; where it curved near the tree roots, the bed of the stream was marry   and between the ruts of deep water green weed fronds swung in the current.     

Nick swung the rod back over his shoulder and forward, and the line, curving   forward, laid the grasshopper down on one of the deep channels in the weeds.   A trout struck and Nick hooked him     

Holding the rod far out toward the uprooted tree and sloshing backward in the   current, Nick worked the trout, plunging, the rod bending alive, out of the   danger of the weeds into the open river. Holding the rod, pumping alive   against the current, Nick brought the trout in. He rushed, but always came,   the spring of the rod yielding to the rushes, sometimes jerking under water,   but always bringing him in. Nick eased downstream with the rushes. The rod   above his head he led the trout over the net, then lifted.     

The trout hung heavy in the net, mottled trout back and silver sides in the   meshes. Nick unhooked him; heavy sides, good to hold, big undershot jaw   and slipped him, heaving and big sliding, into the long sack that hung from his   shoulders in the water.     

Nick spread the mouth of the sack against the current and it filled, heavy with   water. He held it up, the bottom in the stream, and the water poured out   through the sides. Inside at the bottom was the big trout, alive in the water.     

Nick moved downstream. The sack out ahead of him sunk heavy in the water,   pulling from his shoulders.     

It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of his neck.     

Nick had one good trout. He did not care about getting many trout. Now the   stream was shallow  and wide. There were trees along both banks. The trees of the left bank made short shadows on the current in the forenoon sun. Nick knew there were trout in each   shadow. In the afternoon, after the sun had crossed toward the hills the trout   would be in the cool shadows on the other side of the stream.     

The very biggest ones would lie up close to the bank. You could always pick   them up there on the Black. When the sun was down they all moved out into   the current. Just when the sun made the water blinding in the glare before it   went clown, you were liable to strike a big trout anywhere in the current. It   was ahllost impossible to fish then, the surface of the water was blinding as a   mirror in the sun. Of course, you could fish upstream, but in a stream like the   Black, or this, you had to wallow against the current and in a deep place, the   water piled up on you. It was no fun to fish upstream Fitly this much current.     

Nick moved along through the shallow stretch watching the balks for deep   holes. A beech tree grew close beside the river, so that the branches hung   down into the water. The stream went back in under the leaves. There were   always trout in a place like that.     

Nick did not care about fishing that hole. He was sure he would get hooked in   the branches.     

It looked deep though. He dropped the grasshopper so the current took it   under water, back in under the overhanging branch. The line pulled hard and   Nick struck. The trout threshed heavily,  half out of water in the leaves and   branches. The line was caught. Nick pulled hard and the trout was off. He   reeled in and holding the hook in his hand walked down the stream.     

Ahead, close to the left bank, was a big log. Nick saw it was hollow, pointing   up river the current entered it smoothly, only a little ripple spread each side of   the log. The water was deepening. The top of the hollow log was gray and   dry. It was partly in the shadow.     

Nick took the cork out of the grasshopper bottle and a hopper clung to it. He   picked him off, hooked him and tossed him out. He held the rod far out so   that the hopper on the water moved into the current flowing into the hollow   log. Nick lowered the rod and the hopper floated in. There was a heavy   strike. Nick swung the rod against the pull. It felt as though he were hooked   into the log itself, except for the live feeling.      He tried to force the fish out into the current. It came, heavily.     

The line went slack and Nick thought the trout was gone. Then he saw him,   very near, in the current, shaking his head, trying to get the hook out. His   mouth was clamped shut. He was fighting the hook in the clear flowing   current.      Looping in the line with his left hand, Nick swung the rod to make the line   taut and tried to lead the trout toward the net, but he was gone, out of sight,   the line pumping. Nick fought him against the current, letting him thump in   the water against the spring of the rod. He shilted the rod to his left hand,   worked the trout upstream, holding his weight, fighting on the rod, and then   let him down into the net. He lifted him clear of the water, a heavy half circle   in the net, the net dripping, unhooked him and slid him into the sack.     

He spread the mouth of the sack and looked down in at the two big trout alive   in the water.     

Through the deepening water, Nick waded over to the hollow Iog. He took   the sack off, over his head, the trout flopping as it came out of water, and   hung it so the trout were deep in the water Then he pulled himself up on the log and sat, the water from his trouser and boots   running down into the stream. He laid his rod down moved along to the   shady end of the log and took the sandwiches out of his pocket. He dipped   the sandwiches in the cold water. The current carried away the crumbs. He   ate the sandwiches and dipped his hat full of water to drink, the water running   out through his hat just ahead of his drinking.     

It was cool in the shade, sitting on the log. He took a cigarette out and struck   a match to light it. The match sunk into the gray wood, making a tiny furrow.   Nick leaned over the side of the log, found a hard place and lit the match. He   sat smoking and watching the river.     

Ahead the river narrowed and went into a swamp. The river became smooth   and deep and the swamp looked solid with cedar trees, their trunks close together, their   branches solid.  It would not be possible to walk through a swamp like that.   The branches grew so low. You would have to keep almost level with the   ground to move at all. You could not crash through the branches. That must   be why the animals that lived in swamps were built the way they were, Nick thought.     

He wished he had brought something to read. He felt like reading. He did not   feel like going on into the swamp. He looked down the river. A big cedar   slanted all the way across the stream. Beyond that the river went into the   swamp.     

Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading   with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in  places impossible to land   them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together   overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep   water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was   a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He didn't want to go up the stream any   further today.     

He took out his knife, opened it and stuck it in the log. Then he pulled up the   sack, reached into it and brought out one of the trout. Holding him near the   tail, hard to hold, alive, in his hand, he whacked him against the log. The trout   quivered, rigid. Nick laid him on the log in the shade and broke the neclc of   the other fish the same way. He laid them side by side on the log. They were   fine trout.     

Nick cleaned them, slitting them from the vent to the tip of the jaw. All the   insides and the gills and tongue came out in one piece They were both males;   long gray-white strips of milt, smooth and clean. All the insides clean and   compact, coming out all together. Nick took the offal ashore for the minks to   find     

He washed the trout in the stream. When he held them back up in the water, they looked like live fish.  Their color was not goneyet.  He washed his hands and dried them on the log.  Then he laid the trout on the sack spread out on the log, rolled them up in it, tied the bundle and put it in the landing net.  His knife was still standing, blade studk in the log.  He cleaned it on the wood and put it in his pocket.

Nick stood up on the log, holding his rod, the landing net hanging heavy, then stepped into the water and splashed ashore.  He climbed the bank and cut up into the woods, toward the high ground.  He was going back to camp.  He looked back.  The river just showed through the trees.  There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.   
  

Sunday, January 17, 2016

The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway

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 MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT IT’S painless," he said. "That's how you know 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?"

"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."

"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 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."

"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.

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.

"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’t like to leave things 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 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 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?"

"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.

"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 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 another. But his wife said, ''Who is that letter from, dear?'' and that was the end of the beginning of that.

He remembered the good times with them all, and the quarrels. They always picked the finest places to have the quarrels. And why had they always quarrelled when he was feeling best? He had never written any of that because, at first, he never wanted to hurt any one and then it seemed as though there was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that he would write it finally. There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.

"How do you feel?" she said. She had come out from the tent now after her bath.

"All right."

"Could you eat now?" He saw Molo behind her with the folding table and the other boy with the dishes.

"I want to write," he said.

"You ought to take some broth to keep your strength up."

"I'm going to die tonight," he said. "I don't need my strength up."

"Don't be melodramatic, Harry, please," she said.

"Why don't you use your nose? I'm rotted half way up my thigh now. What the hell should I fool with broth for? Molo bring whiskey-soda."

"Please take the broth," she said gently.

"All right."

The broth was too hot. He had to hold it in the cup until it cooled enough to take it and then he just got it down without gagging.

"You're a fine woman," he said. "Don't pay any attention to me."

She looked at him with her well-known, well-loved face from Spur and Town & Country, only a little the worse for drink, only a little the worse for bed, but Town & Country never showed those good breasts and those useful thighs and those lightly small-of-back-caressing hands, and as he looked and saw her well-known pleasant smile, he felt death come again.

in.

This time there was no rush. It was a puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall.

"They can bring my net out later and hang it from the tree and build the fire up. I'm not going in the tent tonight. It's not worth moving. It's a clear night. There won't be any rain."

So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear. Well, there would be no more quarrelling. He could promise that. The one experience that he had never had he was not going to spoil now. He probably would. You spoiled everything. But perhaps he wouldn't.

"You can't take dictation, can you?"

"I never learned," she told him.

"That's all right."

There wasn't time, of course, although it seemed as though it telescoped so that you might put it all into one paragraph if you could get it right.

There was a log house, chinked white with mortar, on a hill above the lake. There was a bell on a pole by the door to call the people in to meals. Behind the house were fields and behind the fields was the timber. A line of lombardy poplars ran from the house to the dock. Other poplars ran along the point. A road went up to the hills along the edge of the timber and along that road he picked blackberries. Then that log house was burned down and all the guns that had been on deer foot racks above the open fire place were burned and afterwards their barrels, with the lead melted in the magazines, and the stocks burned away, lay out on the heap of ashes that were used to make lye for the big iron soap kettles, and you asked Grandfather if you could have them to play with, and he said, no. You see they were his guns still and he never bought any others. Nor did he hunt any more. The house was rebuilt in the same place out of lumber now and painted white and from its porch you saw the poplars and the lake beyond; but there were never any more guns. The barrels of the guns that had hung on the deer feet on the wall of the log house lay out there on the heap of ashes and no one ever touched them.

In the Black Forest, after the war, we rented a trout stream and there were two ways to walk to it. One was down the valley from Triberg and around the valley road in the shade of the trees that bordered the white road, and then up a side road that went up through the hills past many small farms, with the big Schwarzwald houses, until that road crossed the stream. That was where our fishing began.

The other way was to climb steeply up to the edge of the woods and then go across the top of the hills through the pine woods, and then out to the edge of a meadow and down across this meadow to the bridge. There were birches along the stream and it was not big, but narrow, clear and fast, with pools where it had cut under the roots of the birches. At the Hotel in Triberg the proprietor had a fine season. It was very pleasant and we were all great friends. The next year came the inflation and the money he had made the year before was not enough to buy supplies to open the hotel and he hanged himself. You could dictate that, but you could not dictate the Place Contrescarpe where the flower sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the dye ran over the paving where the autobus started and the old men and the women, always drunk on wine and bad mare; and the children with their noses running in the cold; the smell of dirty sweat and poverty and drunkenness at the Cafe' des Amateurs and the whores at the Bal Musette they lived above. The concierge who entertained the trooper of the Garde Republicaine in her loge, his horse-hair-plumed helmet on a chair. The locataire across the hall whose husband was a bicycle racer and her joy that morning at the cremerie when she had opened L'Auto and seen where he placed third in Paris-Tours, his first big race. She had blushed and laughed and then gone upstairs crying with the yellow sporting paper in her hand. The husband of the woman who ran the Bal Musette drove a taxi and when he, Harry, had to take an early plane the husband knocked upon the door to wake him and they each drank a glass of white wine at the zinc of the bar before they started. He knew his neighbors in that quarter then because they all were poor.

Around that Place there were two kinds; the drunkards and the sportifs. The drunkards killed their poverty that way; the sportifs took it out in exercise. They were the descendants of the Communards and it was no struggle for them to know their politics. They knew who had shot their fathers, their relatives, their brothers, and their friends when the Versailles troops came in and took the town after the Commune and executed any one they could catch with calloused hands, or who wore a cap, or carried any other sign he was a working man. And in that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine cooperative he had written the start of all he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard. The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tires, with the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died. There were only two rooms in the apartments where they lived and he had a room on the top floor of that hotel that cost him sixty francs a month where he did his writing, and from it he could see the roofs and chimney pots and all the hills of Paris.

From the apartment you could only see the wood and coal man's place. He sold wine too, bad wine. The golden horse's head outside the Boucherie Chevaline where the carcasses hung yellow gold and red in the open window, and the green painted co-operative where they bought their wine; good wine and cheap. The rest was plaster walls and the windows of the neighbors. The neighbors who, at night, when some one lay drunk in the street, moaning and groaning in that typical French ivresse that you were propaganded to believe did not exist, would open their windows and then the murmur of talk.

''Where is the policeman? When you don't want him the bugger is always there. He's sleeping with some concierge. Get the Agent. " Till some one threw a bucket of water from a window and the moaning stopped. ''What's that? Water. Ah, that's intelligent." And the windows shutting. Marie, his femme de menage, protesting against the eight-hour day saying, ''If a husband works until six he gets only a riffle drunk on the way home and does not waste too much. If he works only until five he is drunk every night and one has no money. It is the wife of the working man who suffers from this shortening of hours. '

"Wouldn't you like some more broth?" the woman asked him now.

"No, thank you very much. It is awfully good."

"Try just a little."

"I would like a whiskey-soda."

"It's not good for you."

"No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you're going mad for me."

"You know I like you to drink."

"Oh yes. Only it's bad for me."

When she goes, he thought, I'll have all I want. Not all I want but all there is. Ayee he was tired. Too tired. He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.

No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about. But what about the rest that he had never written?

What about the ranch and the silvered gray of the sage brush, the quick, clear water in the irrigation ditches, and the heavy green of the alfalfa. The trail went up into the hills and the cattle in the summer were shy as deer. The bawling and the steady noise and slow moving mass raising a dust as you brought them down in the fall. And behind the mountains, the clear sharpness of the peak in the evening light and, riding down along the trail in the moonlight, bright across the valley. Now he remembered coming down through the timber in the dark holding the horse's tail when you could not see and all the stories that he meant to write.

About the half-wit chore boy who was left at the ranch that time and told not to let any one get any hay, and that old bastard from the Forks who had beaten the boy when he had worked for him stopping to get some feed. The boy refusing and the old man saying he would beat him again. The boy got the rifle from the kitchen and shot him when he tried to come into the barn and when they came back to the ranch he'd been dead a week, frozen in the corral, and the dogs had eaten part of him. But what was left you packed on a sled wrapped in a blanket and roped on and you got the boy to help you haul it, and the two of you took it out over the road on skis, and sixty miles down to town to turn the boy over. He having no idea that he would be arrested. Thinking he had done his duty and that you were his friend and he would be rewarded. He'd helped to haul the old man in so everybody could know how bad the old man had been and how he'd tried to steal some feed that didn't belong to him, and when the sheriff put the handcuffs on the boy he couldn't believe it. Then he'd started to cry. That was one story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?

"You tell them why," he said.

"Why what, dear?"

"Why nothing."

She didn't drink so much, now, since she had him. But if he lived he would never write about her, he knew that now. Nor about any of them. The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

He had been contemptuous of those who wrecked. You did not have to like it because you understood it. He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as well as any man, until it went on too long, and wore him out, but here he had something that had hurt frightfully and just when he had felt it breaking him, the pain had stopped.

He remembered long ago when Williamson, the bombing officer, had been hit by a stick bomb some one in a German patrol had thrown as he was coming in through the wire that night and, screaming, had begged every one to kill him. He was a fat man, very brave, and a good officer, although addicted to fantastic shows. But that night he was caught in the wire, with a flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when they brought him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For Christ sake shoot me. They had had an argument one time about our Lord never sending you anything you could not bear and some one's theory had been that meant that at a certain time the pain passed you out automatically. But he had always remembered Williamson, that night. Nothing passed out Williamson until he gave him all his morphine tablets that he had always saved to use himself and then they did not work right away.

Still this now, that he had, was very easy; and if it was no worse as it went on there was nothing to worry about. Except that he would rather be in better company.

He thought a little about the company that he would like to have.

No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can't expect to find the people still there. The people all are gone. The party's over and you are with your hostess now.

I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.

"It's a bore," he said out loud.

"What is, my dear?"

"Anything you do too bloody long."

He looked at her face between him and the fire. She was leaning back in the chair and the firelight shone on her pleasantly lined face and he could see that she was sleepy. He heard the hyena make a noise just outside the range of the fire.

"I've been writing," he said. "But I got tired."

"Do you think you will be able to sleep?"

"Pretty sure. Why don't you turn in?"

"I like to sit here with you."

"Do you feel anything strange?" he asked her.

"No. Just a little sleepy."

"I do," he said.

He had just felt death come by again.

"You know the only thing I've never lost is curiosity," he said to her.

"You've never lost anything. You're the most complete man I've ever known."

"Christ," he said. "How little a woman knows. What is that? Your intuition?"

Because, just then, death had come and rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could smell its breath.

"Never believe any of that about a scythe and a skull," he told her. "It can be two bicycle policemen as easily, or be a bird. Or it can have a wide snout like a hyena."

It had moved up on him now, but it had no shape any more. It simply occupied space.

"Tell it to go away."

It did not go away but moved a little closer.

"You've got a hell of a breath," he told it. "You stinking bastard."

It moved up closer to him still and now he could not speak to it, and when it saw he could not speak it came a little closer, and now he tried to send it away without speaking, but it moved in on him so its weight was all upon his chest, and while it crouched there and he could not move or speak, he heard the woman say, "Bwana is asleep now. Take the cot up very gently and carry it into the tent."

He could not speak to tell her to make it go away and it crouched now, heavier, so he could not breathe. And then, while they lifted the cot, suddenly it was all right and the weight went from his chest.

It was morning and had been morning for some time and he heard the plane. It showed very tiny and then made a wide circle and the boys ran out and lit the fires, using kerosene, and piled on grass so there were two big smudges at each end of the level place and the morning breeze blew them toward the camp and the plane circled twice more, low this time, and then glided down and levelled off and landed smoothly and, coming walking toward him, was old Compton in slacks, a tweed jacket and a brown felt hat.

"What's the matter, old cock?" Compton said.

"Bad leg," he told him. "Will you have some breakfast?"

"Thanks. I'll just have some tea. It's the Puss Moth you know. I won't be able to take the Memsahib. There's only room for one. Your lorry is on the way."

Helen had taken Compton aside and was speaking to him. Compton came back more cheery than ever.

"We'll get you right in," he said. "I'll be back for the Mem. Now I'm afraid I'll have to stop at Arusha to refuel. We'd better get going."

"What about the tea?"

"I don't really care about it, you know."

The boys had picked up the cot and carried it around the green tents and down along the rock and out onto the plain and along past the smudges that were burning brightly now, the grass all consumed, and the wind fanning the fire, to the little plane. It was difficult getting him in, but once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg was stuck straight out to one side of the seat where Compton sat. Compton started the motor and got in. He waved to Helen and to the boys and, as the clatter moved into the old familiar roar, they swung around with Compie watching for warthog holes and roared, bumping, along the stretch between the fires and with the last bump rose and he saw them all standing below, waving, and the camp beside the hill, flattening now, and the plain spreading, clumps of trees, and the bush flattening, while the game trails ran now smoothly to the dry waterholes, and there was a new water that he had never known of. The zebra, small rounded backs now, and the wildebeeste, big-headed dots seeming to climb as they moved in long fingers across the plain, now scattering as the shadow came toward them, they were tiny now, and the movement had no gallop, and the plain as far as you could see, gray-yellow now and ahead old Compie's tweed back and the brown felt hat. Then they were over the first hills and the wildebeeste were trailing up them, and then they were over mountains with sudden depths of green-rising forest and the solid bamboo slopes, and then the heavy forest again, sculptured into peaks and hollows until they crossed, and hills sloped down and then another plain, hot now, and purple brown, bumpy with heat and Compie looking back to see how he was riding. Then there were other mountains dark ahead.

And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evidently figured that they had the gas, and looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the first snow in at ii blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts were coming, up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.

Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange, human, almost crying sound. The woman heard it and, stirred uneasily. She did not wake. In her dream she was at the house on Long Island and it was the night before her daughter's debut. Somehow her father was there and he had been very rude. Then the noise the hyena made was so loud she woke and for a moment she did not know where she was and she was very afraid. Then she took the flashlight and shone it on the other cot that they had carried in after Harry had gone to sleep. She could see his bulk under the mosquito bar but somehow he had gotten his leg out and it hung down alongside the cot. The dressings had all come down and she could not look at it.

"Molo," she called, "Molo! Molo!"

Then she said, "Harry, Harry!" Then her voice rising, "Harry! Please. Oh Harry!"

There was no answer and she could not hear him breathing.

Outside the tent the hyena made the same strange noise that had awakened her. But she did not hear him for the beating of her heart.