| The Heritage Society Presents... | Back to Heritage F.I.E.L.D - First Ismaili Electronic Library and Database |
Though entitled The Valley of the Assassins, Miss Stark's book covers, in reality, a good deal more than that particular area. She describes in addition, not only her discovery of the long-lost Assassin stronghold of Lamiasar, and her travels around the lofty Takht-i-Sulaiman and the adjoining districts of Mazandaran, but also two journeys in Luristan. Her experiences in Luristan are described in the first half of the book.
On her first journey Miss Stark travelled in N.W. Luristan, which still has the attraction of being very imperfectly known. She was very anxious to find some of the Bronze Age graves, in particular, those in which men and horses are said to be buried together, but in this she was disappointed; in many parts the graves had already been rifled, and in others the people were disinclined to dig, sometimes because of religious scruples and sometimes because of their (enforced) respect for the new Persian law of antiquities. Miss Stark nevertheless was able to get one quite interesting skull, and to purchase a number of bronzes. Miss Stark says, in speaking of one of her endeavours to purchase bronzes : "I now had a difficult time, for, with no experience to guide me, I had to estimate every object as it came along and strike a balance between my anxiety to secure it, the necessity of not spoiling my own market, the advisability of not showing that I had any money to speak of with me, and the fact that I had very little."
Miss Stark's second journey was to the mountains of the Pusht-i-Kuh, in search of some hidden treasure which is said to exist in a cave somewhere there. It would be unfair to Miss Stark to give away the "plot" for it makes a good story.
Though many of the tribes-people whom Miss Stark encountered were poverty-stricken, they were as hospitable as their limited means would allow. One of the tribesmen once said to her : "What I have, I give you. What is not here, you cannot have."
When travelling from Qazvin to Alamut, Miss Stark had a better guide than the late Captain Eccles, Mr. J.T. Henderson, and the reviewer had in 1928, for she was able to avoid the route up the river bed in the Alamut gorge, and to go instead by the ancient track over the ridge to the east of the gorge, of which our guide denied the existence. The famous Rock, is as Miss Stark remarks, a grim place. Of the Castle of Hasan-i-Sabbah she says: "Nearly everything is ruined beyond the power of imagination to reconstruct"; this is perfectly true, for the late Captain Eccles and the reviewer endeavoured to make a plan of these remains, but they were in so ruinous a state that the task proved impossible.
Lamiasar (of the remains of which a good sketch is given on p 243) must in its time have been almost as striking as Alamut. It is situated, as Miss Stark remarks, in country about which very little is known, where there are many unidentified sites yet to be discovered in its recesses. It is to be hoped that some day Miss Stark will pay a further visit to those parts and make some more discoveries.
As Miss Stark herself explains, her book was written "for fun", and so much serious archaeological, historical, and geographical data are omitted. Nevertheless, it adds much to our knowledge of these out-of-the-way parts and of the peoples who dwell therein, and the excellent maps will serve to fill in a number of areas that have hitherto been mere blanks.
The book is interestingly and amusingly written, and Miss Stark's descriptions reveal her sympathy with the people she met, and her understanding of them.
L.LOCKHART