BOOK: Freya Stark, "The Valleys of the Assassins"

Freya Stark: The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1952. (First published in 1934.) 287 pp. [A scan of the first edition (London: John Murray, 1934) is available on archive.org, and the page numbers below will refer to that edition. The Penguin edition includes the maps, but none of the photographs, from the 1934 edition.]

Freya Stark was a noted travel writer from the first half of the 20th century; she mostly travelled in the Middle East and wrote a number of books about her experiences, and in fact The Valleys of the Assassins seems to have been her first book. First published in 1934, it is about her travels in 1930–32 in remote mountainous regions in western and northern Persia, where few (or, in some cases, none) Europeans had travelled before. I bought my copy of this book, an unassuming Penguin reprint from the 1950s, very cheaply some twenty years ago and only got around to reading it now. Hence I have no idea why exactly I originally decided to buy it, but probably I must have figured that those regions must have been sufficiently exotic in the 1930s that travels there were bound to make for relatively interesting reading; and moreover that this book would presumably be a good introduction to the work of Stark, whom I was vaguely aware of as a very well-regarded travel writer.

I didn't really enjoy this book all that much, though I mostly found it tolerable in small doses. But it would be unfair to criticize the author for it; she does what she can with the material at her disposal. The problem is simply that I'm not *really* all that interested in travel writing. Of course one could in principle be impressed by an account of great discoveries, but it would be unreasonable to expect that here. Obviously, 1930s Persia was not 1860s Africa, where you could step off the boat, march into the nearest jungle, and immediately begin making monumental geographical discoveries. In Stark's case, the regions she travelled through were poorly mapped and we often see her taking observations and measurements which would, in a small way, make a contribution to geographical knowledge; but hardly the sort of contribution that would make for exciting reading. Similarly, she was clearly interested in ancient tombs, ruins of medieval castles, and the like, and often describes these things; but it is all rather perfunctory, she was no archeologist and her travels were not archeological expeditions.

So if you approach Stark's travels from the perspective of her nominal goals, you're bound to be disappointed again and again. She goes in search of a supposed treasure hoard, but fails to find the cave where it is said to be located; she goes to visit Assassin castles, but they prove to be badly dilapidated ruins; she wants to climb Mt. Takht-i-Suleiman, but has to give up long before reaching the summit. The only way to be fair to Stark is to conclude that these goals were not the real point of her travels, or of her book. When you see her moving from one village to another, from one valley to another, from one dusty nomad camp to another, talking to yet another local landowner, yet another mule-driver, yet another random passer-by, yet another desperate peasant applying to her for medical help — it may seem boring and repetitive to me, who would be inclined to tolerate reading about such things only if I was to be rewarded with the account of some impressive achievement at the end; but you have to be fair and conclude that to Stark, these supposedly boring and repetitive things are the real point of her journey. Clearly she just really liked to spend time in remote corners of Persia, admiring the landscape and getting to know the local inhabitants and their way of life. She often makes interesting observations, and sometimes also funny remarks. No doubt this is a very fine travel book for people who like that sort of thing; it often found its way into anthologies and lists of ‘top X travel books’; but for me it was not really any better than tolerable, and I'm not particularly keen to read any more of Stark's work.

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

Luristan is a remote mountainous region in western Persia, and at the time of Stark's travels there in 1931 it seems to have still been a fairly wild place. Its inhabitants, the Lurs, were divided into nomadic clans or tribes and preferred to live in tents rather than in houses. The Persian government's presence in the area was rather limited; brigandage and stealing were still the “national art” of its people (p. 50), and there was such a thing as “a district which always shoots its policemen” (p. 53).

However, we see many signs of the government taking the first steps to drag the unwilling inhabitants into modernity: it had recently disarmed them (pp. 50, 59) and was now building a road through the area (p. 20) and trying to force the nomads to settle down, live in houses (p. 45), abandon their traditional costume and hairstyles (pp. 21–2, 33), and send some of their children to schools (p. 40). I couldn't help but be sad upon reading about these instances of progress being rammed down people's throats; it was clearly making the world a drabber and less colourful place. Modernity is a horrible thing.

Stark's chief interest in the area seem to have been Bronze Age artefacts for which Luristan had recently become known (p. 44). Apparently there were numerous prehistoric graveyards there, which were being looted at a prodigious scale; she managed to get the locals to dig up a few graves for her, but the finds weren't particularly impressive (pp. 38–9). Moreover, they were afraid that she might be a government spy trying to catch them in the act of violating the Persian law of antiquities (p. 41) — apparently some of them didn't even believe that she was really a woman! (Pp. 53, 56.)

At any rate, it must have taken a good bit of courage for her to travel through such a wild area, mostly accompanied by only one or two local guides or occasionally a policeman. Along the way we also get some interesting and sometimes surprising portraits of people she encountered, such as that of a local chief who, contrary to what you might expect in such a patriarchal society, was totally under the thumb of his overbearing mother-in-law, who had even “relegated his own mother among the servants” :))) (pp. 27–8), or her last guide, who was full of colourful stories of the people he had shot back in the good old days before the government had disarmed them (pp. 54, 58–9).

The Hidden Treasure

This section of the book didn't turn out to be quite as exciting as it promised to be at the start. While staying in Baghdad, Stark was told by a young man named Hasan, from the region of Pusht-i-kuh (the westernmost part of Luristan; still in Persia, but close to the border with Iraq), about a treasure he knew of, in a cave in that remote region; he wanted her help in getting the treasure out of there without anyone else finding out about it (his main rival was an influential ex-vizier who also knew about the treasure; pp. 63–4). He gave her an approximate map and she made arrangements to travel to that area, with Hasan to follow her a few days later.

Stark, together with an old man named Shah Riza who acted as her guide, crossed the border into Persia; they (wisely, as it later turned out) took the precautions of buying passports, although it would have been easy to sneak across the border without one (pp. 71–2). They also had to get trousers and a hat for Shah Riza so he was able to comply with the new Persian costume regulations (which we already encountered in the previous chapter) :)

Much like the northern parts of Luristan that Stark visited in the previous chapter, Pusht-i-kuh was a very remote area with a sparse population of impoverished nomads living in tents; they had been only recently disarmed by the Persian government, whose presence in the area was limited to the occasional police patrol. The police “have stopped all the traffic that used to travel over the mountain passes”, which caused a “general stagnation” (p. 96).

Despite their poverty, the people invariably treated her with great hospitality. On one or two occasions she was able to return the favour by providing them with medical treatment, the most notable case of which was a boy who got bitten by a snake, with very grisly consequences: “The poison had spread upwards, and first his hand, and then his forearm, had dropped off, the latter leaving the bone still sticking out.” (P. 97; amazingly, he got better, pp. 153–4.)

Interestingly, the area doesn't seem to have always been quite as primitive as in Stark's day; there are a number of ruins of solid buildings and towns from centuries earlier. On a few occasions Stark was able to have some old graves dug up (the locals made no objections as long as they were sure that the grave was not a muslim one; pp. 123–4), though without finding anything more important than a well-preserved skull (p. 129; she later gave it to a museum in Baghdad, p. 192).

“The country is so solitary that everyone in it is known who is anyone at all, and it is the most absurd fallacy to imagine that a lonely region is the one for inconspicuous secrecy.” (P. 128.) Inevitably, news of Stark's little expedition reached the authorities in the capital of the region, Husainabad (pp. 90–1), and soon three policemen showed up to investigate what she was up to (pp. 133–4). They didn't explicitly forbid her from travelling, but kept on following her expedition closely, and tried to pressure the locals into not letting her hire their horses.

Eventually Stark did reach the area where the treasure cave was supposed to be found, and she contrived to shake off her attendants and the police for an hour or two, but failed to find the cave in that time (pp. 148–50). Nevertheless she also heard from one of the locals that there is “a big cave, but with nothing inside it” there (p. 151).

They proceeded to Husainabad, the capital of the region, a very small town built recently by the Persian goverment to solidify their control of the area (p. 168; “[t]he town is an alien thing in this country”, p. 176). Stark had extensive interviews with the chief of police and with the governor there; their suspicions revolved around the possibility that she might be a spy sent from Iraq, or that she wants to loot buried treasures, or that she might get herself killed and cause complications to the government (p. 170). She wrote to Teheran hoping to get a permit for further travel and excavations, but eventually instructions came that she was to be “treated with the greatest consideration” but “accompanied the shortest way to the Iraq frontier” (p. 177).

Nothing particularly eventful happened in the remainder of the journey. Upon her return to Baghdad she learnt that Hasan, who was supposed to have joined her during the journey, had actually been imprisoned by order of his rival the ex-vizier, who had furthermore set up ambushes to intercept Stark on her way back to Iraq and quite possibly kill her, or at least steal any treasure that she might have been carrying; so in a way it was very lucky for her that the Persians had forced her to return under police escort (p. 190). Meanwhile, wild rumours had been circulating of the treasures that she had supposedly found (p. 191). The cave, she concludes, remains unexplored and the existence of the treasure uncertain (p. 192).

So in the end, this chapter feels a little anticlimactic; not much treasure-hunting was actually done, and nothing was found. Most of the text is an account of thoroughly uneventful travels from one dusty nomad camp to another, with a little desultory digging from time to time. This gets monotonous and boring pretty quickly.

I was surprised by how good an opinion she had of the Persian police, although they had hindered her so much in her expedition; “I have personally found them obliging, pleasant and honest, and ready to stretch authority as far in my favour as they could.” (P. 189.) Earlier she remarks about how unpopular the police was with the inhabitants of the area: “Although I never saw any act of actual oppression, I found this unpopularity [of the police] so general over the Pusht-i-Kuh that it is impossible not to suspect some justification for it when there is no foreigner looking on.” (P. 165.) But I guess her standards for oppression are different than mine, as she describes several instances of policemen treating people roughly (p. 164).

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

I was aware of the Assassins from before, of course; they inspired one of my favourite historical novels (Vladimir Bartol's Alamut) and one of my favourite video game series (Assassin's Creed). But I never really paid much attention to where their famous mountain stronghold was located and what that area might be like now. So in principle, this chapter should have been an interesting one, as it describes Stark's visit to that area, the valley of Alamut in northern Persia, in 1930.

She starts with a brief historical introduction, which I found informative. I had thought of the Assassins as something more akin to a modern-day terrorist organization, with their dastardly leader, Hasan-i-Sabbah, sending his fanatical adherents to possibly suicidal missions to assassinate his enemies for political reasons (he “treated murder as the suffragette the hunger strike, turning it into an avowed political weapon” :)), p. 198). But as we see here, the whole thing started as more of a religious sect, “a branch of the Isma'ili, who were a branch of the Shi'a” (p. 197), though it soon became very heterodox (p. 218) and came to revolve mostly around Hasan's political ambitions. Apparently, and to my surprise, after the sect ceased to be politically relevant, it nevertheless continued to exist, and still does (or at least did as of the 1930s when Stark wrote this book): “H.H. the Agha Khan receives, as head of the sect, the tithe instituted by Hasan-i-Sabbah [. . .] confirmed during a law-suit before the High Court in Bombay in 1866” (pp. 200–1).

Another interesting detail was that apparently Alamut is just the name of a valley and of the river that flows through it, but not e.g. of a village or of the Assassins' castle itself (pp. 201, 212, 219). Stark mostly refers to that castle as “the Rock”, possibly with an attribute such as “of Alamut” (p. 202) or “of the Assassins” (p. 216). It stands above a village named Qasir Khan (p. 219).

She travelled on muleback, guided by a local mule-driver; they started in the city of Qazvin and travelled for several days, first through a plain and then gradually reaching the hilly country where the valley of Alamut was located. Along the way she made some efforts to collect geographical names, as the area was poorly mapped (p. 212). Eventually she visited the ruins of the castle itself, but they seemed to be in very bad shape: “nearly everything is ruined beyond the power of imagination to reconstruct, and the lower part of the castle [. . .] were inaccessible without climbing-shoes” (p. 221). She also met the local landlord and a suitably suspicious police official, who, however, fortunately didn't give her too much trouble.

She continued to the town of Garmrud on the other side of the valley, where she visited another ruin, the castle of Nevisar Shah (pp. 231), named after a (perhaps legendary?) “unbeliever” king of that name (p. 225). This is where this chapter ends; Stark adds a brief bibliography for “[a]nyone who wishes for scientific information about these matters” but emphasizes that “[w]hat I write here is for pleasure [. . .] I mention the things I like to remember as they come into my head” (p. 228). Unfortunately I find — and this seems to be a recurring feature with this book — that I don't have as much pleasure reading her account as she probably had writing it. This chapter was something of a disappointment to me; the castles she visited turned out to be miserable ruins where nothing impressive or interesting could be seen, and the whole story is just an account of more or less everyday experiences and encounters during a journey through a very remote and mountainous part of rural Persia. Clearly Stark enjoyed her journey and liked to interact with the local people whom she met along the way, but I can't say that it made for a very interesting read.

The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar

I was interested to learn that the Assassins had numerous fortresses; the Mongols destroyed “fifty or more” of them in the 13th century (p. 234). Lamiasar was notable for having held out longer than most of the others. Stark heard about it from a Persian friend who apparently did not know its actual location, so she set out to find it. Departing from Qazvin with one attendant and two mules, it took them a little less than a day to encounter someone who was able to give them more precise directions to Lamiasar (p. 240). They reached the castle after another day of travel; she explored the ruin thoroughly (pp. 245–8), but it doesn't seem to have been any better preserved than the ones in the previous chapter. The area was mosquito-infested and malarial, and the chapter ends with Stark herself starting to feel ill, and her attendant conspiring with their guide “to mention no more castles, even if he knew of them, in the district of the Shah Rud and its mosquitoes” (p. 251). :))

A funny remark from a Kurdish village that had been visited by British surveyors years before: “They were under the impression that Arabic is the British language, and surprised when I told them that we have a language of our own.” :)) (P. 241.)

The Throne of Solomon

The “Throne of Solomon” (Takht-i-Suleiman) is the third highest mountain in Persia, and there is a bizarre legend behind its name: supposedly King Solomon, finding that his wife was unwilling to sleep with him, set up his tent there one time so that the cold would compel her to join him in bed after all :))) (p. 252; but see p. 288 for another version of the legend).

Stark tried to reach the mountain in 1931, and this chapter begins where the previous one left off, with Stark falling ill in the mosquito-infested valley of the Shah Rud. Her illness proved to be a fairly serious case of malaria and dysentery, and she had to pause her journey for a whole week (p. 255). Then, returning to Alamut valley, she managed to get medical help from a Persian doctor who happened to be vacationing nearby (pp. 261–2) and had plenty of experience with her diseases, as they were very common on the Caspian shores (p. 266).

“Ismail had to unload the baggage and coax the mules one at a time round the corner, telling them the most distressing things about their parentage, punctuated with a stick from behind.” (Pp. 254–5.)

When her doctor offered morphine to help her sleep: “His ideas on quinine ran to three times the maximum marked in my medical guide, and I thought that a similar experiment with morphia might have too permanent an effect altogether.” (P. 262.)

Finally she got well enough to resume her journey. On reaching the village of Garmrud (which we already saw in an earlier chapter), she met the two wives of Aziz, her mule-driver (he “looked rather glum when I remarked that, in my opinion, a man's days of peace are over when he has married two times simultaneously”, p. 273 :))). She was also present when three weddings were being held in that village on the same day, and describes some of the local wedding-customs (pp. 275–8).

In the next valley she visited the “Queen of Sheba's bath”, which she often calls a “watering resort”, but it was actually just a hot spring with some improvised stone shelters for visitors (pp. 289–91). She met the Greek wife of a Hungarian engineer who worked as a surveyor for the Persian government (p. 292) — a very rare case of Europeans living in that remote part of Persia.

Eventually they got close to the mountain and spent a couple of days going uphill, mostly walking as the terrain was very hard for the mules. Stark realized she was not well enough yet to try reaching the top, though “there appeared no difficulty for an able-bodied mountaineer” (p. 297). Later it turned out that the Hungarian engineer, not wanting her to reach the mountain that he himself had not climbed yet, had conspired with her guide and got him to lead Stark to the mountain by a route from which the summit would appear too arduous to reach, instead of by a different route where it would have been possible to reach it! (P. 302. As she says in a footnote, the peak was climbed in 1933 by another British visitor.)

Crossing a ridge, they continued north, where the ground slowly begins to descend towards the Caspian Sea; this area was poorly mapped, and Stark hoped to make some contribution with her measurements (p. 307). She took an interest in the location of the medieval city of Kalar (p. 317; she concluded that it must have coincided with the present-day village of Bashm, p. 324), and bought some ancient pots and a bronze spear-head from a local magnate (p. 321).

In the village of Bijeno she was invited to take a hot bath in a swimming-pool used by the wife of the local landlord and her friends; but it proved to be “a subterranean catacomb littered with débris and egg-shells, where five or six elderly Maenads with nothing on to hide the repulsiveness of their bodies welcomed me with exclamations of joy. I felt as if I were to be initiated among witches into worlds of darkness. [. . .] I gathered up my dressing-gown and fled.” :))) (P. 337.)

Towards the end of the journey she visited yet another ruin, “the Maiden's Castle” (p. 349), but even she describes it as “rather disappointing”. Eventually she reached the new road to Teheran which was then under construction, and returned to the capital by car.