The Valleys of the Assassins
August 23rd 2009 06:37
The Valleys of the Assassins
and other Persian Travels
Freya Stark will hopefully continue to be one of the best known women travel writers.
This book covers her adventures in Luristan and Mazanderan in the 1930s when travel was done by mule or horse or on foot. Luristan was a remote area occupied mainly by nomads and the mountains skirting the southern shore of the Caspian altho closer to Teheran than Luristan were just as inacessible. Her account shows us ancient ruins forgotten castles remote moutain areas and tribal and local bureacratic hospitality and hostility
Nowadays Iranians and other tourists can take coach trips or ski tours to the Alamut valley and the the snowy slopes of nearby mountains and stay in hotels or resorts but then a chicken was a luxury and your host might be a bandit a warlord or a herder for whom owning a horse of any kind was wealth.
Reading old travel books is a kind of time travel. Since mos tof us do not have acces to a TARDIS or any kind of time machine reading reprints of old travel books is a peculiar but delightful pleasure. Enjoy.
I read the 1982 Century repirnt of the 1936 original edition. Other versions are available in paperback or hardcopy.
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