>>9992303(13/?)
Up there, it was almost too easy for Gházil to imagine Tehran as half the entire world, surrounded by contaminated streams and bound on its seaward side by limestone walls. Legendary Jamshid himself, while he discovered his realm’s bounties and invented their devoted crafts and professions for his people, must have chosen its valley as his crucible; however, he couldn’t help but imagine the far greater green which lay within the massive peaks adjacent him. Out of necessity, Gházil had already acquainted himself with the mountain trails’ routes, each pavilion and campground, so he knew where his hours of traversing these branching trails would take him: from the trailhead a stone’s throw away, another land accommodated their farther spans and the unseen Caspian shore beyond. Hyrcania lay within its passes, the last holdout of the fallen fire-worshippers against their land’s final Semitic incursions, beyond the known world’s outposts where even gnat-driven Io hadn’t dared to run, in whose far-flung bowers the she-tigers gave their sustenance to destined spurners of lovestruck oriental queens… Nay, only one who had actually perused the charred remains of the great satraps’ dusty records could recall the prevalence of its irrigation canals, which the region’s primeval peoples cut before their makers’ ability to even write their own annals.
