Miss Trefusis, Germophobe
Miss Trefusis is not described as a germophobe, probably because the term didn’t exist at the time. The imagery that Dahl uses to describe her is suggestive of OCD as a reaction to a rather elevated fear of contamination:
“She was eating an orange at the time and I noticed suddenly that she was not eating it in the normal way. In the first place she had speared it from the fruit bowl with her fork instead of taking it in her fingers. And now, with knife and fork, she was making a series of neat incisions in the skin all around the orange. Then, very delicately, using the points of her knife and fork, she peeled the skin away in eight separate pieces, leaving the bare fruit beautifully exposed.”
The Lion Attack
Dahl witnesses a lion attack that would later become the subject of the very first writing for which he was ever paid. The scene comes alive through terrifying imagery that reveals what many readers may suspect: this is not a normal occurrence, even in African villages:
“The lion had the woman by the waist so that her head and arms hung down on one side and her legs on the other, and I could that that she was wearing a red and white spotted dress. The lion, so startlingly close, was loping away from us in the calmest possible manner with a slow, long-striding, springy lope, and behind the lion, not more than the length of a tennis court behind, ran the cook himself in his white cotton robe and with his red hat on his head, running most bravely and waving his arms like a whirlwind”
Mamba vs Man
Snakes are everywhere in the story, but the single most memorable use of imagery connected with the fearsome animal describes a face-off between the “only one that has no fear of man” and a man who appears to have overcome any fear of snakes:
“He crouched very low with one leg behind the other like a runner about to start a hundred yard sprint, and he was holding the long rake out in front of him. He raised it, but no higher than his shoulder, and he stood there for those long four or five seconds absolutely motionless, watching the great black deadly snake as it glided so quickly over the gravel towards him. Its small triangular snake’s head was raised up in the air, and I could hear the soft rustling gravel as the body slid over loose stones.”
The Crash
Dahl survived a horrific plane crash in the desert. The specific details of what happened to cause the crash have become the subject of controversy, but not that the crash happened. He describes in vivid detail the moments of consciousness immediately following that accident:
“The world about me was divided sharply down the middle into two halves. Both of these halves were pitch black, but one was scorching-hot and the other was not. I had to keep on dragging myself away from the scorching-hot side and into the cooler one, and this took a long time and enormous effort, but in the end the temperature all around me became bearable. Then that happened I collapsed and went to sleep.”
