Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with, yet its passing - if this must come - seems the most tragic of all. I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass with its toenails or draw the tusks from the rotted carcass of another elephant and carry them off into the bush. There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.

In 1965 Matthiessen publiPeter Matthiessend At Play in the Fields of the Lord a novel about a group of American missionaries and their encounter with a South American indigenous tribe. Before practicing Zen Matthiessen was an early pioneer of LSD. A.

According to critic Michael Dirda "No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops savannas and the sea. His nonfiction has featured nature and travel -- notably The Snow Leopard (1978) -- or American Indian issues and history -- notably a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His fiction has occasionally been adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) by Luis Buñuel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film of the same name.