Freya Stark (4 page)

It was through Holt, however, that Freya first began to learn Persian, and it was on his prompting that came the first true journey.

The Assassins were a Persian sect, a branch of the Shi’a Moslems, exploited by an unscrupulous Persian family who introduced them to rituals of initiation. Their first grandmaster was Hassan-i-Sabbah, who joined the sect in 1071, used murder and drugs as political tools, and became known to the West through the chronicles of the Crusaders. With some followers, Hasan seized a number of Syrian
strongholds
and ruled over them as a semi-independent fief. His central fortress was at Alamut, in the unpassable mountain ridges of the Caspian, where he urged his
men to practise the liberal arts while governing by assassination. In 1256 the Mongol armies came east; one by one they took the Assassin castles. (This, at least, was the contemporary thinking on the Assassins: a view since discredited by scholars.)

The idea that had come to Freya, sitting in the British Museum in London, was to travel across the area, fix the position of the fortresses, ‘disentangle the absolute wrongness’ of the map, and ‘make for Alamut and Tehran across the jungle country – a lovely blank on the map so far’. Between April 1930 and October 1931 she made two main journeys into Persia, the first being interrupted by a characteristic piece of buccaneering on her part. At a Baghdad dinner party, someone had told her of a Lur boy who professed to have seen twenty cases of ornaments, daggers, coins and idols hidden in a cave in the limestone hills of Kabir Kuh in Luristan. Hoping for a glimpse of the treasure of Nihavend, Freya set up a short, and in the event highly confused, side trip through unmapped country, ending with a couple of hours when she shook off her attentive police escort and scrambled, fruitlessly, about the hills in search of the promised cave. It came to nothing, but it was just the sort of outing she most enjoyed.

To practise Persian, Freya installed herself in the Hôtel de France in Hamadan, and took lessons from a
young man dressed like a clown, with a henna’d beard, frock coat and peaked cap. Every few days, she made short trips into the mountains. After the desert and the dusty plains of Iraq, Persia was enchantingly lush, a ‘wonderful, wild, waste country … tumbled seas of mountains, with pale green valleys, very shallow, and blue and red ridges’. She always travelled alone, and always, as the first European woman in these parts a figure of intense curiosity and speculation, by bus or by horse, and often on foot, with a guide, climbing sometimes very high in search of clues to the lost Assassins. In one valley a man told her of an ancient garden, 11,000 feet up, hidden by snow for several months each year. ‘I got so excited I felt my fingers trembling.’

In 1931 came the real expedition. One August morning, with almost no money, having spent most of what she had on emerald beads, she set out from Hamadan. ‘This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering … It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you: it is yours now forever.’ As she journeyed, Freya gave names to the mountain ranges and villages she passed through. She was gone about four weeks. She found a missing castle, covering the slanting top of a hill, surrounded by cliffs, with a secret passage constructed down to the river, some
800 feet below. She reached it in her stockings, her shoes proving too slippery, and was gratified to hear a later expedition describe her route as ‘unscaleable’.

Malaria, dengue fever, chronic dysentery, heart strain, measles – ill health shadowed every adventure. ‘It is now fourteen years that I have never once done anything without the feeling of fatigue, and I have only started on one of my expeditions without wondering if I was strong enough to face it’, was how she once rebuked her seventy-six-year-old mother, who was complaining about the disadvantages of age. High in the mountains, far from assistance, with the red pinnacles of the Alamut gorge in sight, she collapsed with dysentery. Then came malaria. Her watch stopped; she knew neither date nor time. For a week she thought she would die; but a diet of white of egg and sour milk, the kindness of the family with whom she lodged, and above all her own indomitable disposition, pulled her through. She recorded the episode, the contemplation of death, the fear, the loneliness, dispassionately, sounding very human, but without complaint. It was her father’s death, in Canada, that she had news of when she reached the diplomatic enclosure in Tehran.

The British in Baghdad were impressed. On her return there in the autumn of 1931, Freya found herself seated opposite an archdeacon at the
Residency, a quite new and marked form of social approval. A perceptive editor of the
Baghdad Times,
Duncan Cameron, recognising the potential in her increasingly assured tone and not unmalicious wit, offered her a job writing for the paper at a much-needed £20 a month. Though Freya was not someone to enjoy the rigours of daily office life, she knew instinctively how to handle it. On her first day, no one rose as she entered the office. ‘I made a little speech in the clerk’s room explaining that office women are to be thought of as queens, and men stand up when they come in, and stand up they did, for the whole of the year that followed.’

In Persia, Freya had mapped a number of villages, identified two Assassin castles, gathered material for the first of her travel books, and made a first tentative try at archaeology, employing villagers to help her unearth some graves in Luristan to see whether men and horses were buried together. She had also discovered an intense pleasure in solitude and, more prosaically, had found she possessed a useful knack for falling instantly asleep, wherever she lay down. And she had created a style for her travels, lordly, distinctive, leisurely, fearless. But what made it most particularly her own was an often rather touching combination of self-humour and femininity. In a remote and utterly impoverished village, having
conscientiously massaged her face with cold cream before retiring to bed, she offered some to the young village girls, who clustered always round her tent, thinking anxiously of their complexions.

‘As I have the onus of making a precedent for any British lady who may ever come this way,’ she wrote in one of her daily letters to her mother, ‘I am trying to make her as comfortable as I can. I get my bed and net (so as to get some sort of privacy) put up in the open … then get hot water provided: then turn everyone out of the harem and have a good wash.’

In the early summer of 1933, Freya arrived back in London. She was forty. She had been in the East for more than two years and was now emerging as a rather considerable figure, well versed in Arab matters and with a small, but respectable, expedition behind her. The War Office had approved her map of the Assassins’ Valleys. The
Cornhill Magazine
had already published a number of her articles on the Druzes and on a trip to Canada, when she had visited her father’s farm in British Columbia. With Jock Murray,
great-great
-grandson of Byron’s publisher, a ‘slender young man in tweeds’, soon to become a devoted friend, she now signed a contract for
The Valleys of the Assassins
.
From their first conversations, he was impressed by how meticulous she was over corrections, how quick to see what needed doing, able to re-paragraph and re-punctuate without hesitation. There were rarely arguments; if she believed an observation wrong, she said so, and made no changes.

After so much labour, and such personal uncertainty, the public recognition must have been very pleasing. The Royal Geographical Society presented her with its Back Grant, a tribute to her travels in Luristan; the BBC asked her to speak on the wireless; she lectured to the Royal Central Asian Society and became the first woman to receive the Burton medal of the Royal Asiatic Society. ‘I always travel alone and I am not frightened,’ she told the distinguished audience gathered for the occasion. ‘I used to walk on ahead of my miserable guide, because even a bandit would stop and ask questions before shooting when he saw a European woman strolling on alone, hatless.’ It was all a long way from the scorn of the Baghdad ladies. And then there was the round of social engagements, tea with Sir Percy Cox, first High Commissioner in Baghdad, to the House of Commons with Lady Iveagh, and many new friends. ‘I am in such a vortex – parties all day long.’

One of these new friends was Lord David Cecil. He
remembers with precision the first moment he became aware of her. They were staying at Petworth. Their hosts, Lord and Lady Leconfield, were extremely orderly, and had filled the house with printed notices telling the guests where they could and could not go. In the drawing room stood a table covered with Dresden china; among the porcelain figures was a notice: ‘Do not handle the china’. As they rose to file into dinner, Lord Cecil perceived a lady standing behind him, smiling. She leant down, and picked up a piece of Dresden. ‘You see,’ she said to him, enunciating very clearly, in her formal, rather staccato voice, her eyes shining, ‘I’m handling the china.’ It was Freya; they were friends from that moment.

Another was Sir Sydney Cockerell, friend of Ruskin and William Morris, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. After they met he wrote in his diary that he had been introduced to ‘a nice Miss Stark, who has travelled alone in Persia and is going out again’. Cockerell was a great admirer of female charm, courage and worldly success; Freya possessed the first two, in quantity; she was unmistakably heading towards the third. By her next journey, she had become ‘marvellous little Freya Stark, who is off once again …’ Until his death in 1962, at the age of ninety-four, they were fond friends. He was the recipient of many hundreds of letters from her,
including the long autobiographical letter from Cyprus, and it was he who instigated
Traveller’s Prelude
, the first volume of her autobiography. They met at his house in Kew, for tea, whenever she was in London. ‘You talk of such pleasant, quiet, happy, civilised things,’ she told him; in his diary, he referred to these occasions as ‘rapturous encounters’. Freya could take criticism from him in a way she could from very few others.

What people were now beginning to remark was that Freya was something rather unique in the world of explorers. It was not that where she travelled was very arduous or exotic, or that she was managing to move where no white traveller had gone before. Rather, there was something about her vision of things that singled her out, a certain quality to her observations, so that she appeared to relate landscape, people and their history, and make them all accountable for each other in some way peculiarly her own. She not only noted things that others had not perhaps thought important to record, but she wrote them down in such a way that they meant something to people who read them. The image she presented of Arabia, colourful, dignified, touched a chord in British minds, reared to regard the deserts and mountains of the Near East as settings of nobility and romance. History permeated her landscapes;
history, for Freya, meant not just wars and events but morality, that special quality that tied her to the Victorians.

‘Her great role’, says John Hemming, then secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, ‘was as a communicator. At a moment of doldrums for travellers and travel writing, people read and liked what she wrote.’ There was another important point: she was a woman, and when she travelled, she went alone, with no money and no support.

Recognition in London as explorer and writer could do nothing for her appearance, however, which she continued to lament. ‘Even now I cannot help thinking how much more fun to myself and others I might have procured, but for the absence of a few pigments, a millimetre here or there, a tiny tilt of chin or eyebrow, which those who possess them often scarcely know how to manipulate, and which I felt I might have animated to very great advantage.’ But it could help with clothes. Between 1929 and 1934 she made, she recorded, £272 by writing; £155 was spent on dresses. Clothes had always been important to her. (When W. P. Ker died, Viva Jeyes gave her a silk dress. ‘There are few sorrows,’ she remarked with a sort of sad satisfaction, ‘through which a new dress or hat will not send a little gleam of pleasure however
furtive.’) Few years were now to go by without a new frock from Grès in Paris, a tailored Michael suit, a dashing little hat. It was not exactly vanity; more a delight in finery, a love of fabric and colour and plumage, compensation, perhaps, for the appearance she otherwise felt so dull.

It was probably at tea with Cockerell in November 1934 that Freya met the archaeologist Gertrude Caton Thompson for the first time. ‘There were great talks’, Cockerell recorded in his diary. Both women were evidently much interested in the south-west corner of Arabia and Freya at least was plotting a new trip, to the Yemen, ‘practically
full
of things to discover’, as she noted with pleasure.

The intense delight in departure, that moment of ‘beckoning’, never dulled for Freya; time after time, as the ship sets sail, the train draws away, a new note enters her writing. It is one of vigour, exultation, hopefulness. Her looks may have failed her, people may not have yielded all they seemed to promise, but here at least, her tone seems to suggest, in travel and new places and the remote rugged landscapes of Arabia, there will be no deceptions.

By the middle of January 1935, Freya was on a steamer travelling up the coast of South Arabia. She had paused briefly in Aden, where she had been befriended by a buccaneering figure very much in her
own style, Anton Besse, a French merchant of silks and spices, friend of Rimbaud, lord of the Red Sea traffic and later founder of St Anthony’s College in Oxford. Her goal was Shabwa in the Hadhramaut, alleged Himyaritic capital and centre of the incense trade, seven days’ hard ride without water, never before visited by Europeans.

Her journey would not have been possible before. Until the previous year the Hadhramaut had been at war, split between two reigning dynasties, the Qu’aiti, who presided over the seaboard and the West, and the Kathiri, who held the inland eastern half. Neither had an organised government, their Sultans ruling more or less personally with local tribesmen. Late in 1934, Harold Ingrams, Political Officer in the Aden Protectorate (which covered 112 square miles and was in treaty relations with twenty tribal states, to whom it offered protection in exchange for goodwill and the promise of no meddling in the colony of Aden), had ridden out with his wife Doreen on a camel, on a mission to pacify and conciliate the warring tribes.

On 21 January 1935, with cameras, compass, range-finder, clinometer and aneroid, riding on a donkey and accompanied by guides, Freya set out from the sea town of Al Mukalla, where she had been staying with the Sultan. Hadhramaut means ‘death
is present’. She rode through desert not of sand but of stones, stretching mile after mile across a plateau, with emptiness extending to the horizon. In the villages, built on the edge of wadis, where she was the guest of the local ruler, she visited the harems, listened, observed and talked, in her Arabic that was rapidly becoming fluent and colloquial. Everywhere, she took photographs of landscapes, mountains, wadis, villages and people, lining them up firmly before the camera when they drew back; the results were remarkable, recording people and places never seen before, frozen at one of the last moments when travel was still exploration.

In Masna’a, a medieval castle town, six days’ ride into the desert, as ever prey to a jinx on her health, she caught measles and was kept confined for days, having been told by local women that she must not smell any kind of scent, for it would rush to the head, which because of the dryness of the air, would swell and burst. When she recovered, she was lent a horse and rode on to Seijun, another medieval town surrounded by cliffs, where the women wore long blue gowns and ‘Welsh high hats’ and a family of rich Java merchants gave her a room looking out over palm trees.

Shibam, known to later travellers as the ‘skyscraper town of the desert’ for its tapering,
many-storied mud-and-brick houses which, as the population multiplied, grew upwards, not being able to move outwards because of the encircling city wall, was to have been Freya’s casting-off point for Shabwa. When she got there she again fell ill. This time it was serious. Measles, then dysentery and the strain of the journey seem to have affected her heart. As in Luristan, she thought she was about to die. What she minded more than anything was that a German traveller had now appeared in Shibam and that he too was on his way to Shabwa. ‘I know it is vulgar to want to
be the first
, but yet it is so bitter when one has come so far,’ she wrote to a friend in London. From her bed, when not consoling herself with Virgil, she did her best to stir up anti-German feeling among the Bedouin.

On 15 March, four bombers from the RAF, on a practice flight of the area, bore her off on a stretcher to Aden hospital from where she wrote miserably to her mother: ‘I suppose I have dished women’s chance of going alone for at least half a generation …’

However acute the disappointment, her travels were enough to make a book.
The Southern Gates of Arabia
, published a year later, received warm reviews. Cockerell called it ‘a masterpiece’, and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society chose this moment to present her with their Mungo Park medal.

It was now that Freya and Gertrude Caton Thompson, herself winner of several impressive awards, met to discuss the possibility of digging together in the Hadhramaut, in order to establish whether there had been some cultural contact between Arabia and Africa during the Roman period. They had found a third companion, Elinor Gardner, a geologist, and backing from the Royal Geographical Society and from Lord Wakefield, financial godfather to many such adventures, who presented Freya with a cheque for £1,500.

The party met in Port Said, Freya joining them after a separate trip to the holy Shi’a cities of Najaf and Kerbala, which left her remarking sadly on the struggle for freedom she had witnessed everywhere, and concluding that both French and British efforts failed, ‘the former by adulterating their teaching by the pursuit of power, the latter by too often forgetting that they are there to teach’.

They travelled to Aden by P&0, in great heat; the Red Sea was rough. In the hold were seventy-one packages and bales of provisions, an ‘immense but rather dreary food list’ as Freya commented somewhat archly, adding that a dietician had observed it was sufficient for the ‘very poor in a hot climate: for those who have nothing to do’. Otherwise, her tone was meek. ‘I am just nothing,’ she wrote to a friend,
‘but expect as much fun out of it as any.’

There was not much fun to be had. It is possible that the expedition was always fated, from the very first day when the two distinguished travellers, one an Arabist, the other an Egyptian and African expert, sat discussing their dreams over a cup of tea in Cockerell’s drawing room. Neither Freya nor Miss Caton Thompson was accustomed to doing anything but lead; neither, now, was willing to take second place. (Miss Gardner, malleable, accommodating, desired no other position.)

In Aden, the SS
Narkunda
was met by Stewart Perowne, an ADC sent out by the Governor to collect some visiting oil magnates, who sped the party to shore in the official launch. He and Freya discussed Milton and Tennyson. She found him ‘gay, slim, well dressed, enthusiastic, with a sparkle that matched the sunlight in the bay’. Soon the three ladies, quickly dubbed the ‘three foolish virgins’ by the more malicious old Aden hands, were ensconced on the Ingrams’ roof at Mukalla, falling asleep in night temperatures that never fell below 85 degrees, badly bitten by sand flies, and overcome by the stench of the local delicacy, rotting shark. Freya, muttering crossly that she seemed to have become a ‘glorified courier’, remarked that her two companions wandered with their eyes to the ground while she was ‘inclined to gossip with all the
neighbourhood which slowly gathers and drifts along with us, offering bits of hopeful rubbish’. Gertrude Caton Thompson, used to the Egyptians, dismissed all those who thronged around with disdain; for Freya, a basic rule of travelling was that one should sit around and be pleasant.

The excavation headquarters were at Hureidha, a village lying on the corner of the Wadi Hadhramaut. It was surrounded by sand dunes, stony, dry
watercourses
and fields of wheat and millet, guarded by mud forts. Lodgings for them and their servant Qasmin were found in a small brown house on a hillside above the village, sheltered by the cliff, with a view over a castle. The dig began; a temple was uncovered, then some graves. The following year, when Doreen Ingrams visited Hureidha, the small boys were fascinated by her shoes, but disappointed, for, they told her, Freya’s had ‘much higher heels. In the name of God most high and the religion He glorifies, you couldn’t walk in them they were so high.’