Matthiessen was invited, in 1979, to join what the sponsor called "the last safari into the last wilderness," namely the Selous Game Preserve, largest remaining wild-life sanctuary on the continent, and to extend the hunt with a walk into territory untrodden by white men before, in the company of an ex-gamewarden, Brian Nicholson, and the eminent photographer, Baron Hugo von Lawick. As anyone who has read The Snow Leopard will recall, Matthiessen combines the exhaustive knowledge of the naturalist (he knows the names of everything—bird, bush and mammal!) with a poet's response to farout landscapes. Since the country into which he trekked on this occasion is in one of the new African republics, Tanzania, his book [Sand Rivers] has the twin appeal of a travelogue and a political footnote. Matthiessen confesses to being a sentimental American who would like to argue the cause of Africa for the black Africans. In view of the damaging evidence that accumulates before his eyes or in the reminders of Nicholson, who has spent a lifetime in British East Africa and lately fought a losing battle against native indifference or mismanagement, he does not insist on his thesis. (pp. 627-28)

Sand Rivers is not a political critique of contemporary Africa; it is among the journeys back which have distinguished the trek literature of a hundred years and more, from Mungo Park to Evelyn Waugh and Bruce Chatwin. Yet the political implications which, we gather, Matthiessen and Nicholson not infrequently raised on their long walk, are unavoidable, since the copious animal and bird life which Matthiessen is rehearsing is more than ever before dependent for its survival on human administration, and administration is nothing less than imagination translating the desirable into the operative. Nicholson would like to place his confidence in the occasional Tanzania Game Department official appointed by socialist management who has not been brainwashed to obstruct as a matter of course the "European" experience, but he fears there are not enough of them…. Hence, Matthiessen's narrative, told in the wide-awake terms of a teeming, continuous present, can be read as an elegy for tomorrow, an impression enforced by the autumnal tone of Hugo von Lawick's marvellous pictures, as if the menace as well as the beauty had been photographed just before the last sunset seen by mankind.

Matthiessen,… perhaps feeling that he'll never get another chance to name everything as he sees it, tends to load his paragraphs with more rare birds and insects than any but a specialized reader can identify. When he pauses to relate one marvel to another and senses the particular merging into the general, his command of color, sound and substance conjures the resonance of the vast continental space. "Big pink-and-lavender grasshoppers rise and sail away on the hot wind, the burning of their flight as dry and scratchy as the long grass and the baked black rock, the hard red lateritic earth, the crust of Africa." He is wonderful when recreating the alternate silence and clatter of an African night, and uncommon, I think, in any gathering of prose landscape writing is his talent for actualizing the sounds of wild life: "The early morning sound of a ground hornbill, the remote dim hooting of a woodland spirit, poo-too, po-to"; the "trilling" of a tiny scrops owl; the "high, eerie giggling" of hyenas; the "nasal, puffing snort" emitted by kangoni; the "peculiar, sneezing bark" made by the impala; the "ominous chinking" of a tinker bird; the "squalling and explosive chack" of four boubous chasing through a bush; the "harsh racket" of a roller; the "deep, tearing coughs of a restless leopard," and "the see-saw creaking of the coqui francolin."

As one would expect, he records … the perpetual co-habitation of life and death, glimpsed at any hour within the same frame…. (pp. 628-29)

All this … takes on a more haunted interest for the reader who is aware that this region of Africa—comprising Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti plain, the slave routes to Zanzibar, the sources of the Nile—is alive with associations of past encounters. It was within this area that Speke, in 1861, arrived at the unspeakable kingdom of Buganda (today's Uganda) with its pervert ruler, Mutesa, who buried living wives with their beheaded husbands; where Henry Morton Stanley caught up with Dr. Livingston and, later, travelling north on what he thought was the Nile, found that he was on the Congo. And it is within this quadrangle of territory that a recent school of anthropologists has alleged to have located the home of our immediate ancestor—the killer ape. (p. 630)