Everybody Loves the Assassins (Cont.)

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Everybody Loves the Assassins (Cont.)


	The Elburz Mountains rise over Tehran. (Rob Howard)

LET'S SAY YOUR MOTHER HAS SUFFERED a terrible accident—it doesn't matter what—and she is bleeding to death in the backseat of your car. The hospital is a 30-minute drive away. The streets are wide, two or three lanes in either direction, and they are filled sidewalk-to-sidewalk with slowly moving cars. It is the worst traffic jam you have ever seen in your life. Your mother has ten minutes to live. How will you negotiate these gridlocked streets as your mother's eyes dull and death steals up on her?

That's how everyone in Iran drives, all the time.

Tehran's traffic is the most terrifying in the world, and simply crossing the street is an exercise in daring and judgment involving several very real life-and-death decisions all happening more or less instantaneously. Urban planning doesn't exist: There are no underpasses or overpasses or pedestrian crossings. You just stroll out into the street and move into the laneless chaos of oncoming cars. Sometimes pedestrians gather along the sidewalk—it doesn't have to be at a crossing—and then, as if on cue, they move boldly into traffic, 20 or 30 people at a time, challenging death as drivers attempt to intimidate their way through the herd.

Abbas grabbed my arm and maneuvered me into the rush of cars. It was the most frightening thing I did the entire time I was in Iran: cross the street.

We stopped in a teahouse to discuss the trip. First, we would drive to the vicinity of the Assassins' castles, then later we'd trek over the mountains by way of Salambar Pass. Abbas spoke English with the precision of Inspector Clouseau, and at times his odd iterations approached poetry. At one point we paused to watch a defeated and mournful-looking woman walk by outside. "The lady," he said, "is so sad eyes."

The lady with the sad eyes reminded me that we would be traveling in the footsteps of the indomitable Freya Stark, one of the great travelers of the last century. Between 1930 and 1932, Stark explored Iran (then called Persia) and during her first expedition concentrated her efforts on finding the remains of the castles of the Assassins. Alone, and with very little money, Stark arranged for guides, for donkeys to carry her gear, and then she set off through the passes of the Elburz Mountains, looking for ruins in the place where terror was born.

In 1934 Freya Stark published her account of the journey under the irresistible title The Valleys of the Assassins. Her writing is witty, erudite, wonderfully descriptive, and suggests that she was a woman whose sense of humor served her well in the face of guns, official ineptitude, thuggery, and a few pesky deadly diseases. She



	Shahram "Shroom" Yassemi leads the pack train out of Pichibon. (Rob Howard)

was possessed of that uniquely congenial British ability to appreciate that the most appalling dilemma would eventually devolve into a rather amusing anecdote. She wasn't plucky, not in the ordinary sense: Freya Stark was fearless and daring and courageous. T. E. Lawrence himself called her "a gallant creature." Dame Freya Stark died a knight of the British Empire in 1993, at the age of 101. She is one of my heroes.

But why on earth would a brilliant woman choose to travel alone, in truly dangerous and fearful situations? Jane Fletcher Geniesse, author of Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark, gives us one hint. At the age of 13, Freya, visiting a factory in Italy, caught her long hair in a flywheel and was yanked viciously to the ceiling. An onlooking official, rather than cut the power, pulled her free by her ankles. She lost much of her hair, part of an ear, and her right eyelid in the accident. This disfiguring disaster colored Dame Freya's life: She was, Geniesse declares, "never able to overcome a dread that she might not be attractive to the opposite sex."

Outside the teahouse, a teenage couple strolled by, holding hands. Four years ago, Abbas said, you wouldn't have seen that. Reform is measured in such matters. These days, for instance, women are not obliged to wear the head-to-toe tentlike garment called a chador. Government policy does, however, require that all women seen in public, even Western visitors, wear a scarf and a trench-coat-like affair called a manteau. Legs must be covered, but in a recent bit of giddy reform, women are now allowed to appear in public without socks. Some young women, I noticed, were pushing their new freedom: They were wearing sandals that displayed painted toenails.

Sixty-five percent of Iran's population is under 25 years old. During the Iran-Iraq war, which started in 1980 and lasted ten years, more than 600,000 Iranians died; people were encouraged to have children. Lots of them. And they did. The teens and twentysomethings don't remember the 1979 Islamic revolution that did away with the shah and his secret police, the SAVAK. They don't remember the hostage crisis, in which militant Iranian students held 52 Americans from the U.S. embassy for 444 days. Young people want to listen to loud music and dance and go to parties. All the other kids are doing it. They know this; they see it every day on illegal but ubiquitous satellite TV.

So the government is being pushed toward reform by kids and by TV. It is said those who advocated reform were seduced by the fashions and the media of the West. They were "West-toxified." I asked Abbas, who had switched from fighting in combat to guiding French folks and Italians and Germans and Americans, if he thought he'd been West-toxified.

During the revolution in 1979, he'd been an Islamic idealist, involved with a mosque school. Then he volunteered to teach soldiers mountaineering techniques. He served in the war with Iraq. Eventually he trained as a commando and worked for four years on the border of Pakistan, intercepting massive drug shipments. He spent some time undercover. Of the 24 men he trained with, 18 died.

In all, he'd spent eight years in the army. It wasn't that Abbas was West-toxified; he'd just gotten tired of killing people.

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