Word: snows
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...people are scaling them and breaching them. Their delicate ecology and their inhabitants age-old existence is being squeezed into a different mold. The mountain world of India, Nepal and Tibet is sliding from what it was, and still is in pockets, into what it will become. The Snow Leopard documents this change...
...back. Schaller, an ethologist, went to research mating behavior among a wild herd of bharal, the blue sheep of the Himalayas. He wanted to confirm his speculations that the bharal are a living, missing link between the true goats and the true sheep. He also wanted to see the snow leopard, the most elusive, and one of the rarest, cats in the world, which preys on the bharal. He accomplished both...
...Snow Leopard is a day by day account of the expedition, told soley from Matthiessen's point of view. It is an account of presence, in every sense of the word. The two men move through space and over distance, from Westernized civilization to its outposts and beyond. The author never met Nepalese or Tibetans completely isolated from the world outside their valleys, but he comes close. For Matthiessen, at least, this is a journey to the core. Time has no meaning in a land where the past is no different than the future, where there is only the present...
...porters and sherpas who lead and carry for the two man expedition lug 70 pound loads of lentils and rice and books up snow-choked passes, wearing wool rags at best, and sneakers. Yet, they rarely express their pain or discomfort, though they often stall and procrastinate. They are living proof that Buddhism, at least for Buddhists--which the porters are--works. And since Matthiessen enters their world, it can work for him, too--up to a point...
...more conventional stories tend to find their mark, but here too, the quality is uneven. In "Cortes and Montezuma," Barthelme demonstrates his mastery of a peculiar form that might be called transmogrification of legend, the same form he used in his novel Snow White and several short stories. He takes the fabeled meeting of Cortes and Montezuma and twists it, distorts it, makes it fresh. Among the stories, "Tales of the Swedish Army" relates a sudden meeting of the author and a unit of Swedish soldiers on maneuvers in lower Manhattan, an exercise of the imaginative virtuosity that has characterized...