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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.
Harry yearns for the vitality and excitement of his youth. He quite literally attempts to return to that youth by visiting Africa once again, a place he associates with happiness and adventure. Additionally, Harry realizes that wealth has made him soft, so he hopes that going on a safari will remind him of the fulfilling challenge of living roughly and minimally. However, it’s too late. Harry can physically return to Africa, but he cannot return to his youth. His infected scratch is evidence that Harry is no longer capable of getting back into training.
And in that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine co-operative he had written the start of all he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that…
Paris is one of the most important places in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” as it holds both the best and most influential memories of Harry’s past as well as some of his most tedious. His time in the poor neighborhood where he lived as a young adult shaped him into the man and writer he became. Despite the poverty, he was inspired and energized by his difficult but stimulating life in Paris, and the rough but community-oriented people of the neighborhood. On the other hand, the time Harry spends with Helen in Paris is so boring and meaningless to him that he can’t even remember the names of the luxury hotels they stayed in.
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.
In Africa, the plains that Harry languishes on become a physical manifestation of the emptiness and oblivion of death. The hyena that stalks the area is able to cross between the plane of the metaphorical and the plane of reality, operating as both a literal animal and a mystical symbol of death. Africa too exists both as a literal place and a symbolic landscape, the plains representing sickness and encroaching death while Mount Kilimanjaro represents a place of godliness and purity that can only be reached by mortal beings (like Harry and the leopard) via death.
