Mark Cocker

Where time stands still: a Himalayan pilgrimage

Paolo Cognetti travels to Nepal in the steps of Peter Matthiessen to find the last place on Earth to have remained unchanged

The bharal, or Himalayan blue sheep, the focus of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. Credit: Alamy

The region of Dolpo in Nepal forms part of a border zone between that country and China in the central Himalayas. It is essentially a high-altitude desert encircled by towering snow-capped peaks and has long been celebrated in the West as a real-life version of Shangri-La.

Part of the image flows from the restricted access permitted to outsiders, and also from the lives of its inhabitants, who might belong politically to Nepal but culturally show allegiance to the former theocracy presided over by the Dalai Lama. Dolpo is one of the last places on Earth where a vestige of the traditional Buddhist society of Tibet still survives.

Another key part in its western renown, however, is surely the role it played in the most popular work of the 20th-century American novelist and adventurer Peter Matthiessen. Accompanying his friend, the zoologist George Schaller, Matthiessen was given rare permission to make a prolonged trek through Dolpo, ostensibly to study the habits of a wild sheep found there called the bharal. Yet it was also an opportunity for him to come to terms with the recent death of his wife from cancer.

A dog crossing a stream was ‘so cold that in no time her water-soaked coat whitened with ice’

Mingling Himalayan natural history and ethnography with an autobiographical sketch of his own Buddhist practice, Matthiessen’s account of this journey, The Snow Leopard, is widely hailed as one of the century’s great travel books. In a sense this new work about Dolpo by Paolo Cognetti reflects how travel literature and the places it describes can become inextricably fused for subsequent visitors.

Cognetti’s recent Himalayan expedition was both a pilgrimage to the wonderful otherness and formidable beauty of Dolpo’s landscapes, and also a literary journey in search of its older celebrated text.

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