Alamut

In eleventh-century Persia, Hasan-i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, builds the sect of the Assassins at the fortress of Alamut, and makes his young fedayeen die on command by convincing them, through a hidden garden of drugged pleasures, that he can send them to paradise and back. Bartol sets it at the real crag of Alamut in the Alborz mountains: the fortress itself, the secret gardens behind it, the training grounds of the fedayeen, and the roads down which the assassins are sent against the great men of the age.

Hasan-i Sabbah

The fortress of Alamut

Part 1

From the eyrie of Alamut, all but impregnable on its rock, the cold, brilliant Hasan-i Sabbah directs a sect that will make murder a weapon of statecraft across the Islamic world. The fortress, cut off among the peaks, is the laboratory in which he tests his terrible maxim, that nothing is true and everything is permitted.

Part 1

explicit The action centres on the fortress of Alamut, the real crag-top castle in the Alborz mountains of northern Persia from which Hasan-i Sabbah ran the historical order of the Assassins.

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Halima

The secret gardens

Part 1

In lush gardens hidden behind the fortress, girls like Halima are kept to play the houris of paradise, so that a young man drugged with hashish and brought here for a night believes he has truly visited heaven. The false paradise, and the innocent girls trapped in it, is the beautiful, monstrous machinery at the centre of Hasan's deception.

Part 1

inspired by Behind the fortress Hasan builds hidden gardens of pleasure, his fabricated 'paradise'; the gardens are drawn from the legend of Alamut and sited at the real fortress.

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