Isak dinesen the iguana
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Nights of the iguana
"For the sake of your own eyes and heart, shoot not the Iguana."-- Isak Dinesen, "Out of Africa"
Isak Dinesen learned many difficult lessons in the years she lived in Kenya, one of which is recorded as a hunting incident in her memoir, "Out of Africa": "Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him, was grey and dull like a lump of concrete."
A romantic, an aesthete, a traveler, a materialist, a writer and a hunter, Dinesen had an eye for beauty -- and the impulse to capture it. Her heart was broken more than once when the things and people she tried to possess slipped from her grasp. So while her advice, "shoot not the Iguan
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Often since inom have, in some sort, shot an iguana, and I have remembered the one in the Reserve. Up at Meru inom saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and embroidered all over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied a little in colour and played in green, light blue, and ultramarine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her ledd, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my own arm than it gave up the ghost. It was ingenting now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colours, the duet between the turquoise and the 'nègre' -- that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin that had created the life of the bracelet.
In a utländsk country and with utländsk species of life one should take measures to find out whether things will be keeping their value when dead. To the settlers of Eas
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In the reserve I have sometimes come upon the iguanas, the big lizards, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green, and purple over the stones, the colour seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail.
Once I shot an iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale; all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within th