The Road? The Bakhtiari Road? Why, you can go by motor.
-Twelve Days: An Account of a Journey Across the Bakhtiari Mountains in Southwest Persia, Vita Sackville-West, 1927
It might seem odd- nomads catching the imagination of cinema-going Americans- but…this was the beginning of the golden age of the motor car.
-Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World, Anthony Sattin
When I was ten I remember watching a Castle Films short of Merian C. Cooper’s Grass (1925) in my grandfather’s house, the same film that inspired Sackville-West a year after its premier to ride a mule for less than two weeks on the same forty eight day route from the Bakhtiari tribe’s winter to summer pasture. It was a bit longer for inspiration to take hold of me after seeing the movie, and there was no way to bail out early once underway on the Way of the Forty, but KhairAllah, like the Bakhtiari trail boss Haider Khan, did not tell his greenhorn guests to just go by car. He knew what they were after…saddle sores, and enough stories to last a lifetime.