The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels (Modern Library (Paperback)) - Softcover

Stark, Freya

 
9780375757532: The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels (Modern Library (Paperback))
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375757538 ISBN 13: 9780375757532
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Hailed as a classic upon its first publication in 1934, The Valleys of the Assassins firmly established Freya Stark as one of her generation's most intrepid explorers. The book chronicles her travels into Luristan, the mountainous terrain nestled between Iraq and present-day Iran, often with only a single guide and on a shoestring budget.

Stark writes engagingly of the nomadic peoples who inhabit the region's valleys and brings to life the stories of the ancient kingdoms of the Middle East, including that of the Lords of Alamut, a band of hashish-eating terrorists whose stronghold in the Elburz Mountains Stark was the first to document for the Royal Geographical Society. Her account is at once a highly readable travel narrative and a richly drawn, sympathetic portrait of a people told from their own compelling point of view.

This edition includes a new Introduction by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Stark's biographer.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Freya Stark, described by The Times of London as "the last of the Romantic Travellers" upon her death in 1993, published during her lifetime more than thirty books about her travels in the Middle East, including The Southern Gates of Arabia.

Jane Fletcher Geniesse is a former reporter for The New York Times and the author of the biography Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark, a finalist for the 1999 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, New York magazine, and Town & Country. She lives in Washington, D.C.

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classic upon its first publication in 1934, The Valleys of the Assassins firmly established Freya Stark as one of her generation's most intrepid explorers. The book chronicles her travels into Luristan, the mountainous terrain nestled between Iraq and present-day Iran, often with only a single guide and on a shoestring budget.

Stark writes engagingly of the nomadic peoples who inhabit the region's valleys and brings to life the stories of the ancient kingdoms of the Middle East, including that of the Lords of Alamut, a band of hashish-eating terrorists whose stronghold in the Elburz Mountains Stark was the first to document for the Royal Geographical Society. Her account is at once a highly readable travel narrative and a richly drawn, sympathetic portrait of a people told from their own compelling point of view.

This edition includes a new Introduction by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Stark's biographer.

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CHAPTER I

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

In the wastes of civilization, Luristan is still an enchanted name. Its streams are dotted blue lines on the map and the position of its hills a matter of taste. It is still a country for the explorer.

He finds out what he cannot do

And then he goes and does it.

I did not do it, for I penetrated only a very little way. But I spent a fortnight in that part of the country where one is less frequently murdered, and I saw the Lurs in their own medieval garb—the white tight-waisted coat with sleeves hanging in points from the elbow and white felt caps over the curls that hide their ears. As the aim of the Persian government is to have them all dressed à la Ferangi in a year’s time, with peaked képis and the Shah’s portrait stamped on the lining, it is worthwhile perhaps to give a picture of them as far as possible before too much tidiness spoils them.

Behold then Hajji and me, climbing on very scraggy ponies up to the Varazan Pass. Behind us is the town of Nihavend and the nearer mound of Gian where French archæologists give kind hospitality and press Bovril and ham into one’s saddle-bags—the latter not to be touched, alas! because of religion, which is always interfering with the pleasant conduct of life. Hajji looks gloomy. Friends have told him he is going to be killed. Lessening under our feet, the grassy slopes of Kuh Garu shut in Luristan as with a wall. This climbing into a country which is not considered safe is exhilarating, though no sense of peril is possible in so bright sunlight, such radiant solitude, such breadth of mountain ranges under the pale October sky. As a matter of fact, it is only the other three passes over Kuh Garu which are presumed to be held by robbers at this moment: our Varazan has been in the hands of government for the last six weeks. It is as well to know this beforehand; otherwise one might take the garrison for bandits instead of policemen. They come tumbling out of a round stone tower, their guns polished and clean among the débris of the rest of their attire. They take a toll of eight krans (1s. 5d.) for every pack animal across the pass. When the robbers held it, they took only sevenpence more, and might have gone on making a regular income for a long time if they had not lost their tempers one day with two merchants who thought to bargain fivepence off the tariff and whose death caused a stoppage in the charcoal trade which comes out of Luristan by Kuh Garu; whereupon government dislodged the bandits, handed over ten guns to some Lurs of Khava who are on the side of law and order for the time being, and left the pass and its revenue in their hands.

These volunteers were friendly people, delighted with conversation and chivalrous enough to forgo their eight krans in honour of their first Ferangi from the plain.

They brought little glasses of tea into the sunshine, spread a felt rug, and began to talk about the present security of Persia with the enthusiasm which is general there among the poorer sort. One of them had a wounded leg which I doctored with brandy, while the chief of the post, pushing his long hair out of his eyes and leaning on his gun, slowly read the address on my letter of introduction to the Governor at Alishtar. This letter was an “Open Sesame”: its quite insignificant contents were luckily sealed up, but the name on the envelope had already served to get me through the entanglements of the Nihavend police: its mere production gave the impression that I travelled with the authority of governments behind me and when I handed it to anyone, I tried to cultivate a manner to correspond. I had another letter to the brother of the Keeper of the Varazan, which produced more friendliness and promise of a night’s lodging in the plain of Khava below. The Ten sat in a row looking at me: so did two menials who, they explained, came to do the sweeping, though there was nothing to show for such domestic efforts among the rocks. As the caravans of tribesmen climbed up to the pass, one of our group would stroll across to waylay them and exact the toll: the small black oxen, scarce visible between enormous sacks of goatwool filled with charcoal or grain, strayed on, surefooted, while the men stood counting out the money and brought news of the jungle or the town according as they came from south or north. Their road lay like a ribbon far below us across the plain of Khava whose southern edge, fringed with small pointed hills and further wave-like ridges, vanished into a gentle distance. Very few Europeans travel in this country. Sir A. T. Wilson has been there, and perhaps half a dozen more: and in 1836 Sir Henry Raw- linson marched his Persian regiment across it, locating in his mind as he went the vanished nations whose horses grazed over these open downs.

We parted from the garrison and proceeded with difficulty owing to the jagged steepness of the southern slope, which is scarce practicable for horses. The way from the pass runs down a stony cleft. The whole range is like a wave whose gentle slope we had been climbing from the Nihavend plain, and we now had the sheer side to negotiate: and as we slipped and stumbled among the sliding surfaces of the limestone, Hajji forgot that he had come to me pretending to know every inch of the road, and complained in a pathetic voice that this was no place for anyone but thieves.

It seemed right that the entrance to the forbidden country should not be too easy. Our expectation had been rising ever since Nihavend which, lying so close, yet speaks of Luristan as a region unknown, governed by laws and standards in which the peaceful townsmen have no part. Every day, from far in the southern jungles, the caravans of black oxen bring their loads of corn or charcoal across the mountain wall. The tribesmen, with uncombed hair and eyes frankly hostile, squat in groups of their own under the rampart of the old fortress and have no social dealings with the citizens. The guard on the Varazan, with its ragged clothes and shining gun-barrels, emphasized the point, as it were. When we came to them we reached the gate of a new country. No one travels here unless he has the freedom of the tribes or some other protection: there were no peasants or merchants among the climbers to the pass: only white-coated Lurs fixing us with suspicious, fearless eyes. They gave no greeting, but were ready enough, I found, to answer if one spoke to them.

And now, at a bend in our narrow gorge, the plain of Khava opened out below us, washing like a yellow wave to the rocks of Kuh Garu; dotted in an Arcadian way with black flocks and tents, and intersected from east to west by a grass-banked stream. Away on its southern side it was all pastoral solitude running to small hills; but in its centre were harvested fields of corn, tribesmen tilling, villages where the mountain sank into the plain, and mounds of buried cities here and there.

These must once have been populous places, with a beaten track winding over one of the easier passes from Nihavend or Harsin through the villages of Khava to Alishtar—mentioned in the fourteenth century as an important city—and so to Khurramabad and the eastern plains. Somewhere in this district the rebel Gautama is thought to have been vanquished by Darius: here possibly were the Nisaian pasture lands visited by Alexander on his way up into Persia, but famous for their horses under the Achæmenians long before him. One finds bronzes, flints, and earthenware in the lonely valleys. Wave after wave of people unnamed and unnumbered lose themselves here in unrecorded dimnesses of time.

This, however, was not what occupied our thoughts, but rather the problem of how to find our particular Lurs in a plain about ten miles by twenty in which no one knew the way. A...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375757538
ISBN 13 
9780375757532
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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