Ionia: A Quest. by Freya Stark - 1954.

London, UK John Murray , 1954. Hardcover First Edition (1954), so stated. First Edition (1954), so stated. Very Good+ to Near Fine in Very Good- DJ: The Book shows very mild shelving wear to the lower extremities, which also show a thin line of faint sunning; the outside edges of the text block has tanned somewhat; else flawless; the binding is square and secure; the text is clean. The DJ shows rubbing and soiling to the panesl; a small chip at the bottom edge of the front panel and some small loss to the corner tips and head and heel of the backstrip; the price is intact; mylar-protected. Intact and attractive, but shows considerable wear. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 8vo. (9.25 x 6.3 x 1.25 inches). xxiv, 263 pages. Twenty-three pages of duotone photographic illustrations. Title page wood engraving by Reynolds Stone. Sketch map by E.G. Morton precedes the text. References. Bibliography. Index. Language: English. Weight: 25 ounces. Aqua-Blue buckram over boards with gilt titles at the front panel and backstrip. Some pages uncut and one set of uncut pages has a tear to the outside edges. Hardback with DJ. Dame Freya Madeline Stark, Mrs Perowne, DBE (1893 – 1993) was a British explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as several autobiographic works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabians to travel through the southern Arabian deserts. By 1931 she had completed three dangerous treks into the wilderness of western Iran, parts of which no Westerner had ever visited, and had located the long-fabled Valleys of the Assassins (Hashshashins). She described these explorations in The Valleys of the Assassins (1934). In 1935 she travelled to the Hadhramaut, the hinterland of southern Arabia, where only a handful of Western explorers had previously ventured, never as far or as widely as she went. Stark's first extensive travels after the war were in Turkey, which were the basis of this book on Ionia (1954). The unearthly beauty in her writing and the rare sensitivity in her perceptions of people, events and geography are here to be savored: "As we rode back, and the valley lay shining before us with the mounds of its cemeteries or habitations perhaps plainly visible under the folds of the ground, the great age of the world seemed to be revealed with a sudden poignancy: here men had wandered for thousands of years, their origin and their end unknown. Their dead lie thicker than the living amid these hills."