Valley of the Assassins by Freya Stark

Author:Freya Stark [Stark, Freya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Social Science, History, Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Voyages and Travels, Middle East, Iran, Iran - Description and Travel, Assassins (Ismailites), Women Explorers, Islamic Studies
ISBN: 9780375757532
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 1991-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Small flats of rice-plots far apart had huts beside them: at Sepa there was a wide fertile hollow: at Kainmaru (below which place the track goes by a prehistoric graveyard, pardy looted) and at Gangir, were tiny patches riddled with malaria. T h e huts here were no longer roofed with branches, but roughly made of the reeds leaning towards each other to a point, such as earliest man might have inhabited.

T h o u g h no visible tributaries came in, the river widened.

It was a blue stream, as vivid in that thirsty solitude as a platinum blonde in a monastery, but with no fertile lands around it. T h e hills drew gradually apart, leaving a wide flat bed. Here and there, by the side of the track, were bits of masonry, old aqueducts or bridges: above Sar-i-Gatch, an open space which looked as if there had once been a city.

The flora changed: we came to tamarisk, caper, and oleander.

At Sar-i-Gatch were tents again and ploughed land, the last camp of the Aiwan.

We reached this after sunset and meant to spend the night, and the A i w a n gave us a friendly welcome. But the Gangir waters, let loose among rice-fields just below, hummed under a cloud of mosquitoes, and Saumar, the last Persian tribe, was not more than t w o hours away. T h e W a k k i l -

Bashi suggested a ride after supper to avoid that hot expanse by day.

So we rested and set off again at eight-thirty, and rode over the uneven ground in the moonlight while a policeman and my muleteer, trotting on ahead to scout, sang Kurdish songs, sweet and plaintive in the night: after the day, the air was soft and cool.

The land grew flat: the hills withdrew on either side. The plain of Iraq here runs a wedge into Persia along the stream, intersected with small canals, invisible but evident from the crops on either hand. Large animals were rootling among the maize stalks on our left. " P i g , " said the Kermenshah policeman, and galloped in nonchalandy, turning out five humped and clumsy silhouettes in procession at the other end of the field. At ten-thirty we came upon the tents of Saumar, dim in sleep. A man lying across the entrance was roused, while a chaos of dogs sprang round us, guarding the huddled flocks. The people there soon spread a bit of

" chit99 to enclose a bedroom for me: mattress and pillow were brought: without seeing the faces of our hosts, we slept after ten and a half hours in the saddle.

I w o k e next morning in a w i n d y dawn and saw that we were in the desert. T h e huts of the Saumar were all around, budt and roofed with reeds, whose leafy fronds stuck up like batdements. Some of these were real houses, with three g o o d rooms and a porch.

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