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Much of D.H. Lawrence's life was defined by his passion for travel and it was those peripatetic wanderings that gave life to some of his greatest novels. In the 1920s, Lawrence travelled several times to Mexico, where he was fascinated by the clash of beauty and brutality, purity and darkness that he observed there. The diverse and evocative essays that make up "Mornings in Mexico" - "Market Day", "Dance of the Sprouting Corn", "The Hopi Snake Dance" - bring to life the elemental simplicity of the Zapotec Indians in Mexico, the intense, dark rhythms of the Indians in the American South West and are brightly adorned with simple and evocative details sharply observed: piles of fruit in a village market, strolls in a courtyard filled with hibiscus and roses, the play of light on an adobe wall. It was during his time in Mexico that Lawrence re-wrote "The Plumed Serpent", which is infused with his own experiences there. The spirited eloquence and beauty of the essays in "Mornings in Mexico" thus illuminate the inspiration behind of one of Lawrence's most loved works and immerse the reader in a portrait of the country like no other.

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 descriptions of the landscape, she also wrote of her encounters with the Bakhtiari tribe as they embarked on their epic annual migration. The way of life of the Bakhtiari, a people claiming descent from Fereydun, hero of the Shahnameh, has now all but disappeared, the result of persecution by Reza Shah and the encroachments and temptations of modernity. Sackville-West's descriptions of their everyday life are thus a valuable and illuminating portrayal a vanished world.A book that reveals as much about its author as the country through which she travelled, "Twelve Days in Persia" is a classic of travel writing on Iran and a must-have for all Bloomsbury devotees.