The Snow Leopard

Matthiessen’s extraordinary journey through snowfields and high plateau crosses one of the last great wildernesses on earth. His engagement with the landscape and wildlife – wolves and black bear, ‘fire-coloured dragonflies’, flocks of rose finches and the lammergeier vulture, ‘a nine-foot blade sweeping down out of the north’, is thrilling. However, it is his encounters with the Tibetan people – monks, lamas in their mountaintop monasteries and his often belligerent Sherpas – that affect him most deeply: their unity with the natural world and ‘deep trust in life’ turned his Western mind upside down.