It was our first morning in Iran.

Mashhad was our base for the first couple of days, as we acclimatised and explored the north-east of the country. The distances were vast, and some of the journeys were clearly experimental, but to be seeing things in Iran that Bruce had never seen was a privilege in itself. Our second day took us towards the Afghan border but was broken by a two-mile walk so that we could arrive at an isolated Seljuk caravanserai having understood something of the landscape. Our trip to discover the secret encampment of Nadir Shah (where his treasure had been stored and where he was murdered by his own bodyguard) was accompanied by a thunderstorm that swept a river of mud, speckled with vast boulders, across the road. Like all Bruce missions there was an inscription to be identified – up a narrow mountain gorge, carved into the living rock – which took us through a nomad encampment where he picked up a charming young guide. He was delighted to find that the inscription, like Nadir Shah himself, was vast and imposing, but essentially Turkic with Persian embellishments.

We are delighted to announce that a new series of the Travellers’ Film Club hosted by Waterstones, Piccadilly (203-206, Piccadilly, London) starts this week on Wednesday 27th January, 7pm.

Antony Wynn, author of Persia in the Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes: Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy will introduce and discuss GRASS: A Nation’s Battle for Life.

This 1925 silent documentary follows Haidar Khan and his Bakhtiari tribe on their Spring migration across the flooded Karun River and the snowbound Zagros Mountains of southern Persia to their summer pastures. Filmed on location between Turkey and Iran, Grass is the first ethnographical account of the nomadic Bakhtiari people and was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being ‘culturally and historically significant’.

Directed and photographed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack (who would later go on to produce ‘King Kong’) and Marguerite Harrison, Grass is deliberately styled as a story of man’s triumph over nature, as much a mythic narrative of migration and settlement as a simple travelogue. Venturing through deserts, mountains, rivers and snowy wastelands in search of the life-sustaining grasslands, the Bakhtiari’s 50,000 strong caravan - complete with 500,000 cattle and goats - become the sole focus of the camera’s gaze.

Antony Wynn, who is Chairman of the Iran Society, lived in Iran for many years and has visited each end of this migration - he has yet to ride the middle part.

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