This article argues that the narrative strategy employed by Ryszard Kapuściński in The Emperor can enables the reader to read it as a mythical story. In The Emperor the presence of myth can be detected on two levels, i.e. in the ‘mythical thinking’ of Kapuściński’s informants and in the shape of the highly stylized authorial narration. Myth controls the spatial structure of the story, the characterization of Haile Selassie, the concepts of time, language, and especially the incrustation of the text with elements explaining the unknown by the known.