Philip Percival

In 1926 A F (Pat) Ayre and Philip Percival, two great professional hunters, led the Akeley Eastman safari to Seronera. They brought twenty Lumbwa spearmen from Kenya and filmed the spearing of six lions.

Philip Percival and Bror Blixen were for a time in a partnership. Blixen's branch of the firm was Tanganyika Guides; Percival's, African Guides, based in Kenya. The partnership was managed by J. M. Manley.

Before Hemingway made it to Africa, he had been wounded in the First World War, driving an ambulance at the Italian front; he had earned a living as a journalist; married Hadley Richardson; lived in Paris, where he mixed with the likes of F Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce; been seduced by Spain and the bullfight; divorced Hadley and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a young Vogue reporter whom he met in Paris. By 1933, he had gained an international reputation as a rising star in the literary firmament. Now he was ready for a new adventure; now he was ready for Africa.

Hemingway, his wife Pauline, and Charles Thompson" his friend from his home in Key West" set sail from Marseilles on 22 November 1933. Seventeen slow, sick, rainy days later they arrived in Mombasa, a town one of Hemingway's biographers, Michael Reynolds, described as "the lush green island of Mombasa with its huge-trunked baobab trees, coconut palms, white lime-washed houses, shaded verandahs, shuttered windows, palm-thatched roofs and ebony faces".The bustling metropolis I drove through could not have changed more.

Hemingway travelled by train on the route informally known as the Lunatic Express from Mombasa to Machakos to stay at Potha Hill, the home of the legendary white hunter Philip Percival, who was to lead the safari. Hemingway was to admire him all his life, and immortalised him as the gentle but commanding Pop in the book Green Hills of Africa.

Hemingway spent his stay at Machakos getting used to the altitude, making preparations and getting his eye in for the forthcoming hunting. On 20 December 1933, Hemingway's safari set off for the Tanganyika border. They pushed on through the customs post at Namanga, spent a last night of luxury in Arusha before finally reaching the great Rift Valley, moving up to Lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro game reserve. From the top of the rift wall Hemingway could see "the heavy forest below the wall, and the long, dried-up edged shine of Lake Manyara rose-coloured at one end with a half million tiny dots that were flamingos". The description glows with a sense of wonder that was easy to share as I nibbled biltong on the road from Arusha.

Hemingway's awed aesthetic appreciation of the game sits uneasily with his desire to shoot it dead. Green Hills of Africa is structured around his all-consuming pursuit of the elusive greater kudu. When he finally succeeds, he rhapsodises over the animal: "I looked at him, big, long-legged, a smooth grey with the white stripes and the great, curling, sweeping horns, brown as walnut meats, and ivory pointed, at the big ears and the great, lovely heavy maned neck, the white chevron between his eyes and the white muzzle and I stooped over and touched him to try to believe it... he smelled sweet and lovely like the breath of cattle and the odour of thyme and rain."

The mainspring for Hemingway's greatest African story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, however, was a far from pleasurable experience. The safari, as Hemingway presents it, was a happy occasion, but there was one negative" amoebic dysentery, a debilitating illness. Hemingway could not continue hunting, and Percival decided he needed hospital treatment. The plane which came to take him to Arusha passed the amazing snow-capped peaks of Kilimanjaro on the way.

Here is the source of one of Hemingway's most autobiographical tales: the almost actionless account of a writer who has wasted his talent, who has given himself up to a life of luxury, living off his rich wife, who is dying slowly of gangrene in the shadow of the great mountain, recalling all the experiences he should have written down and now never will.

Hemingway planned to return to Africa the very next year, but in fact his plans were stalled for 20 years. Once again he landed in Mombasa in the autumn, though this time with a different wife in tow, and once again he was to be led by Percival, now in his late sixties, who came out of retirement out of loyalty to his old client.

Hemingway was fortunate to survive his second trip to Africa. As a late Christmas present, he had arranged for a pilot, Roy Marsh, to take himself and his wife Mary on a sightseeing journey over Africa in Marsh's Cessna. All went well, until they reached Murchison Falls in Uganda. As Mary photographed the falls, Marsh suddenly swerved to avoid a flight of ibis and ripped into an abandoned telegraph wire which sliced off the rudder and radio antenna. The plane crashed in the bush about three miles from the Falls, but incredibly, all three emerged relatively unscathed. Next day a boat took them safely to Butiaba.

After such a lucky escape, no one could have expected lightning to strike twice, but almost as soon as Reggie Cartwright's 12-seater de Havilland took off from the short, ragged landing strip, it crashed and burst into flames. Mary, Marsh and Cartwright managed to squeeze out through a window, but Hemingway, too bulky to get through, was forced to bash the stuck door open using his head" his arms still bruised from the previous day's crash" exacerbating his wounds with every battering attempt to save his life.

Blessed with the constitution of an ox, Hemingway was used to bouncing back from the blows his active life dealt him, but recovery was slow and some biographers have seen the African crashes as marking the beginning of his physical and psychological decline.