The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

13. It Is Solved by Walking

ALL SERIOUS PILGRIMS GO ON FOOT TO THEIR holy destination — Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims stand for so many others. Walking is a spiritual act; walking on one's own induces meditation. The Chinese characters for pilgrimage mean "paying one's respect to a mountain" (ch'ao-shan chin-hsiang). As I saw on my Riding the Iron Rooster trip, many Taoists make a point of visiting the five holy mountains they regard as pillars of China, the cardinal compass points as well as the center, separating Heaven and Earth. And there are four other mountains, sacred to Buddhism and associated with a particular bodhisattva. "Paying respect" means climbing the mountains — though this often involves walking up stairs, since steps have been cut into most of the mountainsides. Ambrose Bierce defined a pilgrim as "a traveler that is taken seriously."

In his essay "Walking," in the posthumous collection Excursions (1863), Thoreau spoke of the word "saunter" as having been derived from the French expression "going to the Holy Land": "I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going 'à la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean." And later in this long paragraph he says, "For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels."

The Spanish word sendereando, for hiking, is compact and pretty (sen-dero is path), but the wisest phrase for this activity is the Latin solvitur ambulando ("it is solved by walking"), attributed to Saint Augustine. The phrase was mentioned by the long-distance walker Patrick Leigh-Fermor to Bruce Chatwin. "Hearing it, immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook," Chatwin's biographer wrote. Walking to ease the mind is also an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.

Chatwin regarded walking in an almost mystical way. His predecessors, beginning with the great Japanese poet Bashö, felt the same. Walking inspired the poets Whitman and Wordsworth, and Rousseau based a series of philosophical essays on walks. Stanley walked across Africa twice. When David Livingstone wished to get into shape, and to invoke the traveling mood, he walked for weeks at a time in the African bush, "until my muscles were hard as boards."

Some walks are those of the flâneur, an almost untranslatable French word meaning stroller, saunterer, drifter — the essence of a traveler — but in this case usually one in a city, perhaps the very word to describe someone trying to solve a problem. Some walks by travelers border on stunts or bids for the record book — two obvious examples are Ewart Grogan tramping from Cape Town to Cairo in 1898, and more recently Ffyona Campbell, who in her way walked around the world (see Chapter 14, "Travel Feats").

But it is the committed walker, the thoughtful walker, who interests me the most.

Xuanzang (603–664): The Ultimate Pilgrim

A MONK AND a scholar, the young Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang in some renderings) felt that the Buddhist texts in China were badly translated, debased versions of the originals, so he decided to travel to India to verify them and to bring back as many texts as possible. He hoped also to see the holy places associated with Buddha's life and enlightenment. In some old illustrations he is shown accompanied by a pony — he certainly brought back the manuscripts on packhorses. But in his account of his seventeen years of travels he frequently refers to walking on narrow and difficult trails, and he appears to have traveled alone.

"At a time when the country was most prosperous, and equipped with unparalleled virtue, he started his journey to the remote lands carrying his pewter staff and whisked the dust with his robes," wrote Yu Zhining, Duke of Yanguo, in the original preface to The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. In a postscript to the book, Xuanzang is eulogized: "With the prestige of the emperor, he made his way, and under the protection of deities, he traveled in solitude."

Xuanzang left from the Tang Dynasty capital, Changan — Xian today, site of the terracotta warriors, imperial tombs, and glorious pagodas — and kept going, through Qinghai and across Xingjiang to Bokhara, Samarkand, and into present-day Afghanistan. All the while he made notes on the state of Buddhism, the condition of monasteries, the number of monks. He was awestruck by the giant carved Buddha statues at Bamiyan (dynamited and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, to the cries of "Allah is great!"). He crossed Peshawar and Taxila in what is now Pakistan, describing the ruins of Gandhara, where "there were more than a thousand monasteries but they are now dilapidated and deserted, and in desolate condition." He wandered all over India. The fastidiousness of the early manifestations of the caste system fascinated him: "Butchers, fishermen, harlots, actors, executioners, and scavengers mark their houses with banners and are not allowed to live inside the cities," he wrote of the walled towns of northern India.

Throughout, he chronicled the presence of dragons, some protective, others menacing. He succeeded in his mission to find copies of ancient Buddhist texts, to visit the sacred places associated with Buddha: Gaya, Sarnath, Lumpini Gardens, and at last Kushinagara, where Buddha died. He stayed for years at a time in monasteries, learned Sanskrit, kept traveling, and returned to China with 657 texts, carried by twenty packhorses. At the suggestion of the emperor, he dictated The Great Tang Dynasty Record, finishing it in 646. When it was translated into French and English in the nineteenth century, other travelers (Aurel Stein for one) were able to find the lost cities and forgotten ruins that Xuanzang had so meticulously described. A new edition of Xuanzang's travels appeared in 1996, translated by Li Rongxi.

Matsuo Bashö (1644–1694): Narrow Road to the Deep North

BASHÖ WAS A nickname — it means banana tree: one was planted at the hut of the poet by an admirer, and the poet adopted the name. Bashö is said to be one of the greatest writers of haiku, the highly distilled, rigorously syllabic, and allusive Japanese three-line poem.

A Zen practitioner, Bashö also wrote haibun, a compressed and sometimes staticky prose that resembles the starkness of haiku. An admirer of the mendicant monks, he spent his life alternating spells of meditative living, usually in a remote hut, with walks (occasionally resorting to horseback), some short, several of them quite lengthy, which he re-counted in books that combined prose with poems. He acknowledged Kamo-no-Chōmei (see [>]) as an inspiration in the writing of travel journals. His first, a quest for spiritual wisdom, was The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton (1685). One passage is heart-rending:

On a road along the Fuji River we came upon an abandoned child, about two years of age and crying pathetically. Apparently his parents, finding the waves of this floating world as uncontrollable as the turbulent rapids of this river, had decided to leave him there until his life vanished like a dewdrop. He looked like a tiny bush-clover blossom that would fall any time tonight or tomorrow beneath the blow of an autumn gust. I tossed him some food from my sleeve pocket, and mused as I passed by:

Poets who sang of monkey's wailing:

How would they feel about this child forsaken

In the autumn wind?

(translated by Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashö, 1977)

In 1689 Bashö took his most ambitious trip, nine months of walking that resulted in his best-known work, his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (or Back Roads to Far Towns), at the time a remote and forgotten part of Honshu, the main island of Japan. Bashö was accompanied by his friend Sora, and both dressed as pilgrims. On this long walk Bashö describes the enlightenment he seeks:

Spent night at Iizuka, bathed at hot-springs there, found lodgings but only thin mats over bare earth, ramshackle sort of place. No lamp, bedded down by shadowy light of fireplace and tried getting some rest. All night, thunder, pouring buckets, roof leaking, fleas, mosquitoes in droves: no sleep. To cap it off the usual trouble cropped up [illness], almost passed out. The short night sky at last broke, and again picked up and went on. But the night's traces dragged, mind balked. Hired horses, got to post town of Ko-ori. Future seemed farther off than ever, and recurring illness nagged, but what a pilgrimage to far places calls for: willingness to let world go, its momentariness to die on the road, human destiny, which lifted spirit a little, finding foot again here and there, crossing the Okido Barrier in Date.

— Back Roads to Far Towns, translated by

Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu (1968)

The Nomadism of Bruce Chatwin

CHATWIN WAS DELIBERATELY enigmatic, but a relentless explainer in the excitable way of a self-taught and widely read person, fond of theorizing. His work has this same excitable, distracted quality, with flashes of true brilliance in description. He was greatly influenced by Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana, and this admiration shows in his own work, in his idealizing oddity of description and a love of the grotesque or unexpected. His self-assurance showed, as Augustus Hare said of Mrs. Grote in his autobiography, as the stating of every belief "with the manner and tone of one laying down the laws of Athens."

Chatwin was just as unambiguous in his belief in the value of walking. Walking defined him. And he felt that walking defined the human race — the best of it. His earliest work was on nomads; he lived his life on the move. Chatwin scoffed at the term "travel writer" and even "travel book." He claimed that much of what he wrote, sold as "travel," was fiction. "The Songlines is a novel," he said, though most readers regard it as Bruce's own adventures in the Australian outback. Some of In Patagonia was made up or fudged. He was contradictory, intense, unreliable, elusive, a compulsive exaggerator, almost a Munchhausen, and also secretive. "Hate confessional mode" he wrote in one of his notebooks.

Chatwin could seem at times frivolous, or so intense and demanding as to be exhausting. But without question he was an imaginative writer and one of the great walkers in travel literature.

This is not plain in the text of In Patagonia, where a typical sentence is "I left the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn" — a trek of two hundred miles, but he doesn't say how he got there. Or "I crossed over into Fireland" or "I passed through three boring towns" or "I went to the southernmost town in the world." He is an insubstantial presence in his books ("I am not interested in the traveler"), but in his letters home he was explicit. "Dying of tiredness. Have just walked 150 odd miles," he wrote to his wife.

The walker sees things clearly: the sun on the walker's head, the wind in the walker's face, the country under the walker's feet: "I walked out of town to the petrified forest," he wrote in The Songlines. "Wind pumps whirled insanely. A steel-blue heron lay paralyzed under an electric cable. A dribble of blood ran along its beak. The tongue was missing. The trunks of extinct monkey-puzzles were broken clean as if in a sawmill."

If The Songlines is a novel, as Chatwin said, it is a very patchy piece of fiction. I think he meant that he invented much of it, and this may be true; but making things up in a travel book is not the same as writing a novel. The Songlines is a book arguing the case for nomadism: "The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu."

This, on Chatwin's part, is bad history. The historian Fernand Braudel, in his study of global shifts in culture, The Structure of Everyday Life, writes that nomads were "horse- and camel-men" who "represented speed and surprise at a period when everything moved slowly." Chatwin seems not to have known this. Later in The Songlines, he asserts, "Natural Selection has designed us — from the structure of our brain cells to the structure of our big toe — for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert."

Chatwin spent some weeks in an SUV in Australia, visiting Aboriginals. But what one remembers of these visits, and the stops in the outback, are the many instances of racism and mindless abuse from Australian whites (he was traveling in the mid-1980s). When he is on foot his prose is sharper:

I walked over a plateau of sandhills and crumbly red rock, broken by gulches which were difficult to cross. The bushes had been burnt for game-drives, and bright green shoots were sprouting from the stumps. [Then I climbed the plateau to find] Old Alex, naked, his spears along the ground and his velvet coat wrapped in a bundle. I nodded and he nodded.

"Hello," I said. "What brings you here?"

He smiled, bashful at his nakedness, and barely opening his lips, said, "Footwalking all the time all over the world."

— The Songlines

Werner Herzog: Walking on Foot Is a Virtue

ON HIS DEATHBED, "Bruce summoned Herzog because he thought the director had healing powers," Nicholas Shakespeare wrote in his biography Bruce Chatwin. "When they first met in Melbourne in 1984… their talks had begun with a discussion on the restorative powers of walking. 'He had an almost immediate rapport with me,' says Herzog, 'when I explained to him that tourism is a mortal sin, but walking on foot is a virtue, and that whatever went wrong and makes our civilization something doomed is the departure from the nomadic life.'"

Herzog's belief in solvitur ambulando is unshakable. In an interview he said, "I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing."

And he walked the walk. In 1974, hearing that the German film director Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris, Herzog decided to walk the five hundred miles there from Munich, "believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot." He added, as passionate walkers often do, "Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself." He was thirty-two. It was the winter of 1974. He described the journey in Of Walking in Ice (1980).

Herzog traveled almost as a mendicant. He rarely stayed in hotels, preferring to break into unoccupied houses and sleep in them, or sneak into barns and sleep in haystacks. He was frequently taken to be a tramp or an outlaw — he was indeed a trespasser, but that too is often the role of a walker. He was sent away from inns and restaurants for his sinister appearance.

His route was as the crow flies ("a direct imaginary line"), taking him through cities and slums and garbage dumps and past motorways; this is anything but pastoral, and yet his mood is reflective. His prose is cinematic, composed ofheaped-up images, like a long panning shot of a young man trudging through snow and rain, across bleak landscapes, never making a friend, never ingratiating himself. His legs ache, his feet are so blistered and sore he limps. He writes, "Why is walking so full of woe?"

He records his dreams, he recalls his past, his childhood, and his prose becomes more and more hallucinatory. Nearer Paris, where he will find that Lotte Eisner has not died, he is strengthened by the sight of a rainbow: "A rainbow before me all at once fills me with the greatest confidence. What a sign it is, over and in front of he who walks. Everyone should Walk."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Reveries of the Solitary Walker

THE TITLE SAYS everything of this posthumous book. Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire is the last thing Rousseau wrote; he worked on it until a few weeks before he died, in 1778. The word "walk" is a specific activity in the book, but it also implies an essay, the word Montaigne used to mean a try, or an attempt.

"I am now alone on earth," Rousseau writes in the first line of the "First Walk," and announces that this sequence of walks will take the form of self-examination. Detached from everything and everyone for fifteen years (because of exile, condemnation, and harassment), utterly alone, he asks, "What am I?"

His serene condition, which he calls renunciation, is like that of the mendicant saddhu who wanders in India. "Everything is finished for me on earth. People can no longer do good or evil to me here. I have nothing more to hope for or to fear in this world; and here I am, tranquil at the bottom of the abyss, a poor unfortunate mortal, but unperturbed, like God himself."

Through walking, Rousseau remembers events, interprets his actions, and recalls embarrassments — a key one in the "Fourth Walk" when, asked about his children, he claims he doesn't have any. It is, as he writes, a lie. Rousseau had five children, who, for their own good (so he claimed in his Confessions and here too), he stuck in a foundling home. But this memory provokes a reverie about being untruthful.

His meditation on happiness in the "Fifth Walk" produces one of the many bittersweet reflections on the transitory nature of joy: "Happiness [is] a fleeting state which leaves our heart still worried and empty."

In later walks he speaks of how a country ramble can be spoiled or overpowered by certain conditions, how "memory of the company I had left followed me into solitude," and how particular itineraries had put him into contact with people he found upsetting. A tone of resignation permeates the Reveries. Rousseau was through trying to persuade anyone that he was worthy. Intensely autobiographical, it is a set of excursions that become reflections on life and death, for a man who is about to die.

Wordsworth: A Nature Poet with "Serviceable Legs"

WORDSWORTH'S PASSION FOR walking inspired his poems, which often praise the joyful activity of walking. At the age of seventy-three, reflecting on one of his earliest poems, "An Evening Walk," he wrote that he was an "eye-witness" to the features of the countryside that he put into the poem. Speaking of a particular couplet, he wrote, "I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was in the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply, in some degree, the deficiency."

His life was shaped by walking. Walking home after a party, while in his teens, overcome by a sunrise and a glimpse of mountains, he felt he was witnessing a revelation, and was so moved he decided that his role in life would be a "Dedicated Spirit."

Walking became part of his routine, living with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Dorothy remarked on how he walked for hours, even in the rain, and that "he generally composes his verses out of doors."

"He was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs," Thomas De Quincey wrote waspishly, yet his legs were "serviceable," adding, "I calculate, upon good data, that with those identical legs Wordsworth must have traveled a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles."

Wordsworth ambled around Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In his fifties he toured the Continent, walking up and down France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and elsewhere, writing the whole time. Even in his sixties he was able to walk twenty miles a day. Dorothy wrote, "And as to climbing of mountains, the hardiest & the youngest are yet hardly a match for him." At seventy he climbed Helvellyn, at over three thousand feet the third-highest peak in the Lake District.

He died at the age of eighty, a few weeks after being taken ill on a walk. One of the oddities of Wordsworth as a lover of flowers and fresh air is that (so everyone who knew him testified) he had no sense of smell.

Thoreau's "Walking

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, who made a sacrament of walking, was a relentless analyzer of his experience and a constant refiner of his prose style, as his voluminous journals attest. And Thoreau was never happier than when he was robustly explaining the crochets of his life. His essay "Walking," which appeared in his posthumous volume Excursions, is one of his happiest pieces. It is also one of the best essays on the subject of perambulation. Thoreau lived near enough to nature in Concord that he did not have to go far to feel he was surrounded by wilderness, even when he could hear train whistles.

He is specific about miles — he walked as much as twenty a day, he says — and about hours too: "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least, and it is commonly more than that, sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements."

This sacramental walking must not be confused with mere physical exercise, he says, but is more akin to yoga or a spiritual activity. "The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!" Since walking cannot be separated from the process of thought, "you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.'"

In "Walking" Thoreau writes, "Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey." This is a classic Thoreau conceit, the isolated farmhouse every bit as satisfying as distant Dahomey. In fact, Thoreau was a wide reader of travel books, and though Sir Richard Burton's Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomey came out the year after Thoreau died, he was familiar with Burton's travels in the lake regions of central Africa and elsewhere — twelve of Burton's books of travel and discovery were published in Thoreau's lifetime, including Wanderings in West Africa.

He invokes Burton in this essay, saying, "Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveler Burton says of it, 'Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded… In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.'"

But Thoreau, who avoided traveling on ocean, in desert, or through wilderness, belittled foreign travel, persuasively insisting it was not necessary to the serious walker. It is this persuasiveness — the triumph of his prose style — that made him far more influential than men and women who lived heroic lives of travel. Never mind counting the cats in Zanzibar, Thoreau says: "There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you."

John Muir: "Fond of Everything That Was Wild"

LATE IN HIS life, when he was seventy-five and had only a year more to live, John Muir, one of the greatest of walkers, wrote The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), beginning it with this sentence: "When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures."

The large family (Muir was one of eight children) emigrated from Scotland to America, settling first in a shack, then on a farm in Wisconsin. Muir's father, Daniel, was a severe disciplinarian: "The old Scotch fashion of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness, and of course many of those whippings fell upon me."

A combination of his strict religious upbringing and a love for nature seems to have driven Muir from home and given him a mystical love for the natural world and a way of understanding wilderness. He lost his faith in organized religion but never failed to see something spiritual in nature.

A tinkerer and an inventor, he dreamed of exploring the Amazon jungles, like Alexander von Humboldt, one of his heroes. But apart from a short spell in Cuba he remained in the United States and became an early advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas, a cofounder of the Sierra Club, and the moving force behind the creation of America's national parks.

He was by nature a wanderer, and even as a fairly young man he was as bearded and bright-eyed as an Old Testament prophet. In 1867, at the age of twenty-nine, restless after a series of setbacks, he decided to walk from Indianapolis to Florida. His diary from this journey was published after his death as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. "My plan," he wrote, "was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, least-trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest."

The forests of this great walk are lovely, but many of the people are distinctly menacing, for in the aftermath of the Civil War (unconscripted, Muir spent most of the war years sauntering in Canada), the South was in a state of derangement. He meets robbers, though he carries nothing worth stealing; he is confronted by "guerrillas" on horseback, ten of them at one point; and he encounters desperate former slaves. He stumbles upon a cotton plantation, three years after the war ended, still being run by a man known as "massa" whose field hands are "large bands of slaves."

What Muir had intended as a long walk through America was marked by hunger, danger, and uncertainty. Two years later he was in San Francisco, unhappy as always among crowds of people and eager to leave the city. He asks for the nearest way out.

"But where do you want to go?" a stranger responds.

"To any place that is wild," Muir says.

Directed to the Oakland ferry, he sets off for the wilderness on the first of April 1868, a walk that would change his life. He described his trek as slow, enchanted, easterly, toward the Yosemite Valley.

Muir was eloquent in his descriptions of landscape. He was also, like many other nature writers, something of a misanthrope, a trait noted in Driving Home by Jonathan Raban, who is a persuasive dissident on the subject of Muir's style. (Raban deconstructs Muir's sublime language as misleading, even subversive, the origin of today's "cult of 'pristine' wilderness.") Muir's charismatic personality aided his evangelism in the cause that wilderness must be preserved: Teddy Roosevelt became an important supporter after going on a journey with him. But it was Muir's prose, perhaps overegged, and his evocations of the Sierra that made his case and gave us the national parks as well as his shelf of distinguished books.

From his first glimpse of Yosemite, as he reminisced in The Yosemite (1912), his vision was apparent.

Looking eastward from the summit of the Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; below it a belt of blue and dark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple; all these colors, from the blue sky to the yellow valley smoothly blending as they do in a rainbow, making a wall of light ineffably fine. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.

Peter Matthiessen: "All the Way to Heaven Is Heaven

PETER MATTHIESSEN (BORN 1927) is a happy combination of fine writer, courageous traveler, scrupulous naturalist, and spiritual soul — he has his own Buddhist dojo at his home on Long Island. A committed walker, he has traveled and written about Asia, New Guinea, Africa, and Antarctica. His The Snow Leopard is one of the great accounts of someone "paying respects to a mountain." Toward the end of the book, suffused with the spirit of the trip, exhausted but uplifted, Matthiessen writes: "I lower my gaze from the snow peaks to the glistening thorns, the snow patches, the lichens. Though I am blind to it, the Truth is near, in the reality of what I sit on — rocks. These hard rocks instruct my bones in what my brain could never grasp in the Heart Sutra, that 'form is emptiness and emptiness is form'—the Void, the emptiness of blue-black space, contained in everything. Sometimes when I meditate, the big rocks dance."

This is also an example of someone solving philosophical problems by walking, a deeply felt, subtly written, and arduously tramped-out account of Matthiessen's search for the elusive snow leopard of the Himalayas — in essence a search for his own peace of mind.

"In late September of 1973," he explains at the beginning, "I set out with GS [George Schaller] on a journey to the Crystal Mountain, walking west under Annapurna and north along the Kali Gandaki River, then west and north again, around the Dhaulagiri peaks and across the Kanjiroba, two hundred and fifty miles or more to the Land of Dolpo, on the Tibetan Plateau."

The snow leopard, the "most beautiful of the great cats," had been sighted by only two Westerners in the previous twenty-five years. To get a glimpse of one of these "near-mythic" beasts was the formal reason for the trip, but in effect this is Matthiessen's pilgrimage: a search for healing after the death of his wife, a search for the sources of Buddhism, and a contemplation of a landscape regarded as holy by the Nepalese who live in the region. If there is a journey that is the opposite of the expensive, breathless guided climbs up Everest that Jon Krakauer writes about, it is this book, which has much more in common with Bashö, whom Matthiessen quotes with approval.

In ten- and eleven-hour treks, Matthiessen and Schaller rise higher and higher into the mountains, suffering from the cold and the altitude and the difficult trail, creeping on narrow traverses above deep and precipitous valleys. Such obstacles are inevitable, as Matthiessen writes: "Tibetans say that obstacles in a hard journey, such as hailstones, wind, and unrelenting rains, are the work of demons, anxious to test the sincerity of the pilgrims and eliminate the fainthearted among them."

One of the more terrifying obstacles — this, at eleven thousand feet — are the fierce guard dogs of the Tibetan refugees who inhabit their heights. "In Tibet, where wolves and brigands prosper, the nomad's camps and remote villages are guarded by big black or brindle mastiffs. Such dogs are also found in northern Nepal." Matthiessen successfully fights off an attack by a slavering mastiff and pushes on.

The book is a self-portrait of Matthiessen the pilgrim, but also a portrait of George Schaller, a scientist, skeptic, and part-time misanthrope whom Matthiessen takes pains to enlighten. He teaches him the tenets of Zen Buddhism, and then "I tell GS of the Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhardt and Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, and Saint Catherine of Siena, who spent three years in silent meditation: 'All the way to Heaven is Heaven,' Saint Catherine said, and that is the very breath of Zen, which does not elevate divinity above the common miracles of every day."

In a treacherous part of the mountains he reflects on the possibility of dying in this dangerous place — and he accepts the idea: "Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to 'win my life by losing it,' which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment."

Toward the end of the journey, the snow leopard unglimpsed yet still inspiring his pilgrimage, missing his family and friends, Matthiessen receives a batch of mail from home. Wishing to be at one with the landscape and people around him, he deliberately does not open them; he puts them in his pack, to be opened when this journey is over. If the news is bad, he says, there is nothing he can do to leave any earlier from this remote place. "And good news, too, would be intrusive, spoiling this chance to live moment by moment in the present by stirring up the past, the future, and encouraging delusions of continuity and permanence just when I am trying to let go, to blow away, like that white down feather on the mountain."

In our present overconnected, hyperactive age, this is a salutary book and worthy of its predecessors: Bashö, Wordsworth, Thoreau.