The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen

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.

Here is a better review of the book, done in 1978 by The New York Times .