In the Library
Hills Like White Elephants
Ernest Hemingway, 1927
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 1k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
Heat off the dry hills, a bamboo bead curtain stirring across the doorway, two glasses sweating on a station table in the valley of the Ebro while a man and a girl wait for the express to Madrid. They order beer, then Anis del Toro, then beer again, and around every drink circles the one thing he wants and she does not: an abortion, a word Hemingway never lets either of them say. He calls it simple, just to let the air in, nothing really at all; she looks at the long white hills and says they look like white elephants, then quietly takes it back. In five pages you watch how gentle reasonableness becomes a kind of force, how a person can be talked toward something while both pretend the choice is hers. This is the iceberg made flesh, everything that matters held just below the surface, the silence saying what no speech could. The hills stay across the valley, long and white, and no one crosses them.