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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First up, it it pretty hard to go past this cover and not love it, I reckon. Not even sure what it is that is so appealing, the yellow gives it an aged look; the (presumably) Persian painting at the base; the symmetry of the ruin; the title itself evokes the badlands; right down to the font on the authors name. Must be worth a star or two, especially for me - a sucker for a good cover at the best of times.
The book itself recounts several separate trips undertaken by Freya Stark, primarily to Iran, but partially in Iraq, and often close to the borders of both. Stark is a pretty legendary traveller / explorer, who thinks nothing of challenging popular opinion with regard to the safety of a woman travelling solo (albeit with her local support crew), but even more so the safety of the places she proposes to visit.
Armed with her obvious determination, her quick wits, her wide knowledge, and not just a little charm, she manages to turn many situations to her advantage, as evidenced by her carrying out archaeological investigations under the very nose of the police who are sent out to prevent her doing so, and escorting her away. She is also quite philosophical, as you can see from some of teh quotes below.
However, it is hard to ignore the fact that Stark is essentially a grave robber, obtaining skulls and grave goods her primary target for her travels - although she justifies it to her readers (and herself) on the basis that she is obtaining these for museums and the like to preserve them, which is better than selling them to dealers for private collectors. Her other goal on her travels is mapping - the foreword suggests she was probably working for Intelligence, authorised to undertake her travel for this purpose alone. Also with a knowledge of the Koran, and able to speak passable Arabic, Stark is no fool - although she is also able to take advantage of the fact others may jump to other conclusions - My favourite anecdote from the book:
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid that one is and no one is surprised. When the police stopped our car at Bedrah and enquired where we were staying, the chauffeur, who did not know, told him to ask the lady.“That is no good,” said the policeman. “She's a woman.”“Yes,” said the chauffeur, “but she knows everything. She knows Arabic.”The policeman asked me.I had not the vaguest idea of where we were staying, and looked at him with the blank idiocy which he thought perfectly natural.
Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.–It is a remarkable fact that the people who do things by hand still find time to add to their work some elaboration of mere beauty which makes it a joy to look on, while our machine-made tools, which could do so at much less cost, are too utilitarian to afford any ornament. It used to give me daily pleasure in Teheran to see the sacks in which refuse is carried off the streets woven with a blue and red decorative pattern: but can one imagine a borough council in Leeds or Birmingham expressing a delicate fancy of this kind? Beauty, according to these, is what one buys for the museum: pots and pans, taps and door-handles, though one has to look at them twenty times a day, have no call to be beautiful. So we impoverish our souls and keep our lovely things for rare occasions, even as our lovely thoughts - wasting the most of life in pondering domestic molehills or the Stock Exchange, among objects as ugly as the less attractive forms of sin.–He himself had never done so illegal a thing as to open a grave, said ‘Abdul Khan, picking at his opium pipe with a bronze bodkin two or three thousand years old, and looking at me with the calm innocence of a Persian telling lies.–If I were asked to enumerate the pleasures of travel, this would be one of the greatest among them - that so often and so unexpectedly you meet the best in human nature, and seeing it so by surprise and often with a most improbable background, you come, with a sense of pleasant thankfulness, to realize how widely scattered in the world are goodness and courtesy and the love of immaterial things, fair blossoms found in every climate, on every soil.
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