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| Mount Demavend in the Lahr valley, Persia. Photo credit: Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Swiss National Archives |
When Annemarie Schwarzenbach lived in Tehran in 1935, she spent time in the summer in the Lahr valley north of Tehran, overlooked by the Demavend mountain (which is Iran’s highest peak and Asia’s highest volcano). In Das glückliche Tal/The Happy Valley she writes about Mount Demavend.
She sees it as an immortal being, a guardian of the liminal spaces, straddling heaven and earth, both caution (reminding the truculent, ambitious and ego-driven) and inspiration (to those who seek something greater than themselves).
My translated excerpt from Das glückliche Tal
In summer it still wears a striped cloak of lava and melting snow. It has wrapped a cloud round its shoulders and sometimes has a light veil thrown over its head. It has no base, it floats over the valleys, towers above the mountain range, greets the sea and unites with the stars. It is enormous, and at the same time, insouciant. It shimmers day and night in a soft light. Without it this valley would be nothing, it would be like a thousand other valleys. The mountain is what makes it the valley at the end of the world.
Maps are deceptive. They only know one point of view and in the intersection of north, south, east and west, Demavend remains always one and the same. But I have seen another Demavend. It was, I remember, in spring, on the route between Isfahan and Tehran. In spring, and the streams were overflowing their banks. Rivers were pouring out of mountain gorges without warning, like avalanches. They plunged onto the plain, carved a channel, burrowed a trench for themselves, settled into the barren Persian soil, became yellow and heavy and powerful as if they wanted their wide floods to lead on to the sea. But after only two days, or even one, they would be defeated by the vast plain and leave only an empty river bed behind them.
Obstacles on the journey – a nightmare of obstacles! In Persia for the first time and I wanted to leave – and I was still there, lying on a river bank, because there was no bridge, because this river was not marked on the map, because the snow melted in the anonymous hills, because it was spring.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
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| Mount Demavend, Persia: Photo credit Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Swiss National Archives |
She then goes on to describe their experience of trying to cross the river in the flash floods, and her first sight of Mount Demavend in the distance, eighty kilometers away.
(to be continued)
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