Mrs. Major Griffiths
Dahl is introduced to the concept of going native—in which those exiled for one reason or another to an exotic location begin to lose their sense of national identity and take on aspects of the foreign—by the shocking sight of first Major Griffiths running around the deck naked and then his wife. He makes an allusion to fine art to create a metaphorical punctuation:
“My God, she second one looked like a woman!...It was a woman!....A naked woman as bare-bosomed as Venus de Milo.”
Miss Trefusis
It is elderly coffee plantation owner Miss Trefusis who introduces Dahl to the concept of going native, though the British prefer the term “going barmy.” She warns that everyone who grows old in Africa goes barmy and yet there is also still something clinging desperately to concepts of British civilization within her. She is, in the lexicon of the modern, a germophobe with a bent toward OCD who expresses very strong opinions on the matter of cleanliness:
“Fingers are foul and filthy, but toes! Toes are reptilian and viperish! I don’t wish to talk about them!”
The Lion and the Woman
Dahl vividly describes an incredible incident in which he witnessed a woman being dragged away clutched in the jaws of a lion. His use of simile in this example might seem tonelessly out of place were it not for the fact that in the end everything winds up okay:
“the lion ignored everybody, not altering his pace at all, but continuing to lope along with slow spring strides and with his head held high and carrying the woman proudly in his jaws, rather like a dog who is trotting with a good bone.”
Standing Alone in the Sinai Desert
Dahl describes a journey he loved taking without irony, one that required showing officials he had five gallons of gas and five gallons of drinking water before he was allowed to go. When the radiator overheats, he reaches a moment of sublime existential awareness:
“The stillness was overpowering. There was no sound at all, no voice of bird or insect anywhere, and it gave me a queer godlike feeling to be standing there alone in such a splendid hot inhuman landscape—as though I were on another planet, on Jupiter or Mars, or in some place more desolate still, where never would the grow green nor a rose bloom red.”
Pilot Fighting
Dahl receives training as a fighter pilot when World War II breaks out and provides much description about the experience. He also gives insight into a primal difference between battles high in the sky and those down below on the ground fought between members of the infantry:
“A fighter pilot never expects to come face to face with an enemy flier. To him the machine is the enemy.”
