1938Alamut
Vladimir Bartol
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.
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