Palin flies over Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa at 19,340 feet.
|
Rooftop of Africa
Mount Kilimanjaro is famous for the cloud cover that shrouds it from eager
tourists hoping for a look at Africa's tallest peak. Hemingway complained that on his second trip
the mountain didn't show itself for three weeks and I become despondent, but by the time I've dressed
and walked up the hill to the spreading timbered and thatch-roofed space where we eat breakfast, the cloud has rolled back to reveal the
whole long crest of the
mountain,
|
Palin tries again to summon up his killer instinct with a group of Masai warriors, but ends up making them laugh.
|
"as wide as all the world," as Hemingway described it in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." It is an
unbelievably powerful sight. On the
eastern tip of this great ridge a glacier catches the sun. Hemingway would probably have been out by now and bagged
a gazelle or two, but things have changed. Most people who come to Africa nowadays shoot the animals
with Leica and Pentax rather than Mannlicher and Browning. National Parks have been created to protect
the animals (Amboseli opened soon after Hemingway's last visit) and white hunters have largely been
superseded by black rangers and game wardens.
|
