by Jane Fletcher Geniesse
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The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels (Modern Library) by Freya Stark |
by Peter Mortimer
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by Nicholas Clapp
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by Wilfred Thesiger
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Amazon.co.uk Review
In 1934, a 42-year-old Englishwoman named Freya Stark arrived in the British-governed Protectorate of Aden on a singular mission: to locate the fabled, long-lost city of Shabwa. The Southern Gates of Arabia is her story.
Located on the high Hadramawt plateau in what is now Yemen, Shabwa was renowned in antiquity as the source of frankincense. Little visited even then, it was also thought to be a particularly forbidding place; Genesis mentions it as the "enclosure of death", and the Roman geographer Pliny reported that it contained 60 great temples and wealth beyond measure. That was good enough for Stark, who, having not long made a difficult passage across the badlands of Iran, thrived on improbable adventures; and so, by burro and whatever mechanical conveyances she could find, she ascended the high mountains into a world that was sometimes perilous, but that also sometimes approached fairy-tale dimensions, as when, climbing the Hadramawt she writes: "The path kept high and open, until gradually the valley clefts narrowed again upon us, and shut us in walls whose luxuriant green made a romantic landscape of the kind usually only invented in pictures."
Stark never reached Shabwa; laid low by the measles, she had to be evacuated from territory overrun in any event by warring religious factions and gangs of bandits. Though cut short, her time in the Yemeni highlands yielded this superb travel narrative, full of uncommon vistas and milieus--harems, bazaars and Bedouin camps among them). Anyone who values tales of adventure well told will find Stark's body of work--and this book in particular--to be full of treasures. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Review
'This book recaptures all the romance, beauty and primitive atmosphere of that still unspoilt Arabia of spices ... and the high-walled cities and little-known desert stretches.' -- Irish Times 'Extraordinarily rich and authoritative ... a book to treasure' -- New York Times 'There aren't many writers who rise so clearly above the teeming marketplace of travellers as Freya Stark' -- The Spectator 'Freya Stark unites in one mind the traveller, the historian, the philosopher and the poet' -- TLS 'The Hadhramaut is still unfamiliar ... No outsider has caught its spirit as gently and wonderingly as did Freya' -- Tim Mackintosh-Smith
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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