ONE summer I spent some weeks in Persia among the mountains of Elburz, and rode or walked about the passes that separate the Caspian jungle from the plain Qazvin. I still think of these landscapes as among the most beautiful in the world, and remember long days on stony paths, with the bells of the mules tinkling behind me as they found their steps in valleys yet unmapped, by rarely visited streams.

The villages lie north and south of the main range on cultivated slopes in the sun's eye, by the banks of waters shaded under trees. They have little to do with the southern plain whose wall is notched in their skyline, where a few steep ways lead down; but within the mountain cradles one valley communicates freely with another by routes of boulders worn through centuries of traffic, that wind in loops and zigzags over watersheds. From the edges of the snow one looks back, and sees the villages by their waters like dull brown beads strung on the light thread of the track; they become smaller and smaller, until the thread continues alone and reaches the pass, and ties with loose and twisted ends on to another thread, that drops to another necklace of villages by another stream, upon the farther side.

The mountains are high, and uninhabited stretches separate the last and smallest village from the first one on the other watershed; the track to the pass climbs among rocks with glistening scales of mica in waterless ravines; the trees that follow some vein of moisture die away in stunted growths of thorn until there is only juniper flattened by wind among boulders; and this, too, gives way at last to the short grasa that grows in the pockets of the snow. Then one may taste the northern wind and know that the pass is near.

Some of these crossings are difficult and lonely, and one can walk a day without meeting a traveller; but others are highways in a land where wheeled traffic is unknown, and all morning long the caravans go up or down, and the bells of the mules and the songs of the Charvadars and the thwack of their sticks on the obstinate buttocks of their animals resound and echo, and make a liveliness among the naked hills. The traffic has regular hours, determined by the distance of villages with stabling for the night. Usually, as the afternoon declines, human voices cease; some shepherd will talk or pipe to his flock from a rock where pastures end; apart from him the eagles fly alone. With the coming of night the babble of the streams rises from all their valleys, not loud but clear because of the silence of the waterless places where the smooth winds are heard as they move from shoulder to shoulder.

Then the pass becomes a gateway to the stars. Beyond a black saddle, between buttresses whose detail is lost or wanly shining perhaps with snow, the stars hang as if the edge of the world were there and one could reach them. They swing in the night-wind that makes them twinkle and never touches earth; and their shivering light, and their steadfast journeying and their repeated presence make them companions as one lies sheltered in some corrie, a part of the shadow of the hills.

It happened that in this Elburz summer the constellation of Peranu night after night spanned the gap of the pass with his scimitar. He danced in a wind whose earthly brother blew thin from the north and the Caspian Sea. I came to feel his stars as a friendliness and a bond in the gaiety of spaces and the cold of night. The memory has remained and has given the name of Perseus to this book, in which I have written about things that are beyond our grasp yet visible to all, dear to our hearts and far from our understanding as the constellations; a comfort for the frail light they shed. Without being astronomers, in our separate darkness, we rejoice in them, and from our caves, our twilights of belief and ignorant names and lonely journeys, feel that we are a fellowship that looks to the same stars.

Freya Stark,
Perseus in the Wind,
1947