Freya Stark · 1934 · overland

Freya Stark's 1934 book, which made her name. Travelling in western Persia largely alone, with local guides and very little money, she mapped valleys no European had surveyed and went looking for the castles of the Assassins in the mountains north of Qazvin - and wrote it up with a dryness that makes the risks easy to miss.

1. 1
   Baghdad

   Stark bases herself in Baghdad, learns the languages, and sets out east into Persia on journeys that no European woman and few European men of the period were attempting on those terms - which is to say, without an expedition.

2. 2
   Luristan

   In the Luristan mountains she travels among tribes the government does not control, looking for bronzes and for the shape of valleys that were not on any accurate map - and is arrested, delayed and quietly persistent throughout.

3. 3
   Alamut

   North of Qazvin she finds the Rock of Alamut, the eleventh-century stronghold of the Assassins, and surveys the valley around it - a place written about for eight hundred years and visited by almost nobody who wrote anything down.

4. 4
   Tehran

   She comes out through Tehran ill with malaria and dysentery, having added real detail to the map of a country that was largely guesswork - and having established a way of travelling she would use for the next fifty years.