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| Arrangement, lights and photography - Geetanjali Roy |
Just finished reading Peter Matthiessen's Snow Leopard. I think Sumit-da had originally suggested the book to me and that's when I first heard about it. I had purchased the book way back in 2014. But picked it up to read only after I came back from Roopkund and started planning for the Annapurna Base Camp trek.
I feel a kind of void that I always feel after reading a great book. Here is a review I wrote for India Hikes (I proposed to them that they carry a section on book reviews on their website and they readily accepted my suggestion. They asked me to help out with a few reviews to start off with). Actually I wrote it before completing the book. I still had about a hundred pages left when I wrote it.
Now that I have finished reading, I don't think I would have written anything extra if I wrote it now. So here goes.
In the September of 1973 Peter
Matthiessen, a New Yorker, novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer and a
student of Buddhism, teamed up with field biologist George Schaller to trek
more than 400 kilometers over five weeks to go to a particularly remote and
little known area in the North West of Nepal – the Crystal Mountain in the
Inner Dolpo region, beyond Shey Gompa (not to be confused with the Shey
monastery of Ladakh).
Their main
objective behind embarking on this difficult trek was to undertake a scientific
study of the bharal or Himalayan blue sheep. A mountain goat that abounds in
these parts of the Himalayas. The mysterious animal was relatively less known
in those days to the Western scientific community because its natural distribution
and habitat is restricted only to difficult geographies that were closed to the
Western world for a very long time.
Schaller,
himself a renowned field botanist, wanted to prove that the Himalayan blue
sheep was “less sheep than goat and perhaps quite close to the archetypal
ancestor of both”. To establish this, he needed to observe them in rut (mating
season) and study their behavior during this crucial period. They also hoped
that where bharals were abundant it would be entirely possible to get at least
a glimpse of their main predator – the elusive snow leopard.
The snow
leopard in the early 70s was almost a mythical animal. Hardly anyone in the
Western world had ever seen it. Schaller had, making him the second western
scientist to ever see it in 25 years.
In the process
the duo, then 46 and 40, ended up walking through some of the most scenic but
difficult and lesser known parts of Nepal with its unique people and culture. Starting
from Pokhara they walked through Dhorpatan to cross Jang La and past the
beautiful Phoksundo Lake (also known as Emerald Lake) over Kang La to Shey
monastery. There was an urgency of sorts in the inward journey to Dolpo. They
had to reach before winter to see the blue sheep in rut, which happens in
November.
The book that
he writes about this now epic journey, some five years later, is written in the
form of diary entries. But it never degenerates into a dry account of just a
trek. It is a lot more than that and in the world of Himalayan literature this
book is now seen as a classic that has withstood the test of time over almost
forty years.
While there are
detailed accounts of the everyday highs and lows of a difficult trek done with
basic equipment in delayed monsoon, he intersperses it with lyrical description
of nature and the indigenous people of the area, his reflections on life in
general, Buddhist philosophies, the memories of the recent death of his wife.
He manages to move almost seamlessly in and out of subjects as varied as the effects
of psychedelic drugs on the mind and the flight of a bearded vulture.
More often than
not, Matthiessen adopts the stream of consciousness style of writing where he
puts words to his train of thoughts only and does not follow a linear
narrative.
Matthiessen’s thorough
knowledge about the natural world including astronomy and natural history comes
out in every page without boring you, even if you know nothing about the
subject. But his philosophical analysis of Buddhism or Zen and Tao theories can
be quite dense at times. He also talks at length about the history of entry and
evolution of Buddhism in Tibet (the Dolpo region is culturally and
geographically more Tibet than Nepal) from India.
It is difficult
to distinguish where mythology ends and history begins. For that is the way
Tibetan Buddhism is all about. He also talks at length about Bon religion and
its present form. The Bon religion used to be the religion of Tibet before
Buddhism came. There are still some Bon monasteries in this region (there are
some in India also) but the religion has undergone significant changes after its
contact with Buddhism.
Only serious
scholars of Buddhism can comment on the authenticity of all that Matthiessen
says about the various forms of Buddhism. He gives copious notes on most of
what he says with citations at the end of the book that mentions the sources of
what he says.
But this is not
a research thesis. There is a lyrical quality about his prose, particularly
when he describes the natural environment or life in the remote, high altitude
villages through which he travels. He describes the mountain people and their
difficult life with a certain empathy that is often missing in the accounts of
Western travelers of that era.
Matthiessen has
no illusions about being a mountaineer, which Schaller, six years his junior,
is. He speaks candidly about his fears of tumbling down the icy slopes and
makes no bones about the fact that he was often scared about losing his life.
Matthiessen’s
compassion and empathy for the locals is often in stark contrast to his and
particularly Schaller’s contempt for the porters of the team and their frequent
betrayals. He paints them as lazy and slow without pointing out how much load
they were actually carrying or the quality of their protection, like shoes,
warm clothes or eyewear. Many of them actually fall victim to snow blindness
which hampers the team’s progress.
His love and
respect for the two Sherpas of the trekking party is obvious but no such luck
for the hapless porters.
While it is
easy to understand why Schaller went for the trip, it is difficult to fathom
why Matthiessen chose to undertake it. In fact, he himself raises the question
without offering any plausible answer. Reading the book one gets the feeling
that much as he was trying to discover himself and the inner truth of life
through this journey, in the end it becomes a spiritual journey where nature
and religion conjugate freely.
