A year after Vita Sackville-West first travelled to Iran - a journey described in the classic Passenger to Teheran - she returned to the land that had so captured her imagination. For twelve days, with her husband and three friends, she embarked on a difficult and often dangerous journey through the rugged and wildly-beautiful Bakhtiari Mountains of south-western Iran. It was a landscape that affected Sackville-West profoundly, inspiring what is arguably some of her most lyrical prose; in the same year she wrote her acclaimed poem, The Land. Interwoven with her magical...