Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream

My grandson Matthew, who is spending a couple of months in southern Kenya, took this photograph from his front yard earlier this week. It shows Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest mountain, a few miles away in Tanzania. Even in June, two weeks before the summer solstice, there is snow on the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. That is due to the fact that the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro is almost 20,000 feet (5,895 m) above sea level. At other times of year, as the giraffe below knows, there is much more snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro:

Down where Matthew is, among the people, the temperature tomorrow is expected to reach 73 degrees Fahrenheit (23 Celsius), which is quite pleasant. Here where I am in Loonyville Canton, Georgia, however, the high is expected to be 93 degrees Fahrenheit (34 Celsius), which is hot and humid. This strikes me as quite odd, since Matthew is in the tropics (latitude 2.8 degrees South) and I am in the temperate zone (latitude 34.24 degrees North). I suppose the reason has to do with differences in altitude. But I don't want to be scientific right now. I want to be literary.

Here, for your reading pleasure and general edification, is Ernest Hemingway's short story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". Published in 1936 in Esquire magazine, it was made into a film in 1952 starring Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, and Ava Gardner. The film's ending differs from Hemingway's.

Fair warning -- it has very little to do with either snow or Kilimanjaro.

Read Hemingway's story. See the film if you can, or read about its differences in Wikipedia. Then, and only then, discuss.