From Freya...

Freya Stark (1892-1993) traveled in Persia and Arabia in the 1930s and recorded her adventures in Luristan and Mazanderan (regions north and west of Tehran. Mazanderan appears to border the Caspian Sea's southern rim.) I've only started The Valley of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels, but I already have some quotes for you. When she died, The Times of London called her "the last of the Romantic Travellers" [Bad spelling the result of being British. :) ]. She has a predictably lovely sense of irony.

I came to the conclusion that some more ascetic reason than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel in peace: to do things for fun smacks of levity, immorality almost, in our utilitarian world. And though personally I think the world is wrong, and I know in my heart of hearts that it is a most excellent reason to do things merely because one like the doing of them, I would advise all those who wish to see unwrinkled brows in passport offices to start out ready labelled as entomologists, anthropologists or whatever other -ology they think suitable and propitious.

Preface, page xxii

I spent a fortnight in that part of the country where one is less frequently murdered.

page 3

The climbing into a country which is not considered safe is exhilarating, though no sense of peril is possible in so bright sunlight, such radiant solitude, such breadth of mountain ranges under the pale October sky.

page 4

Wave after wave of people unnamed and unnumbered lose themselves here in unrecorded dimnesses of time.

page 6

What a lady Ms. Stark must have been!