He listened once,
and sneaked into the deepest black within the doorway and crouched
and waited.
II.
Hanadra reeks of history, blood-soaked and mysterious. Temples piled
on the site of olden temples; palaces where half-forgotten kings
usurped the thrones of conquerors who came from God knows where to
conquer older kings; roads built on the bones of conquered armies;
houses and palaces and subterranean passages that no man living knows
the end of and few even the beginning. Dark corridors and colonnades
and hollow walls; roofs that have ears and peep-holes; floors that
are undermined by secret stairs; trees that have swayed with the
weight of rotting human skulls and have shimmered with the silken
bannerets of emperors. Such is Hanadra, half-ruined, and surrounded
by a wall that was age-old in the dawn of written history.
Even its environs are mysterious; outside the walls, there are carven,
gloomy palaces that once re-echoed to the tinkle of stringed instruments
and the love-songs of some sultan's favorite--now fallen into ruins,
or rebuilt to stable horses or shelter guns and stores and men;
but eloquent in all their new-smeared whitewash, or in crumbling
decay, of long-since dead intrigue.
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