Word: persia
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...last remnants of Roman and Byzantine order, Mohammed's hard-riding followers quickly achieved one of the world's greatest military conquests. Armed with fast cavalry and such innovations as the stirrup (giving lancers leverage), Arabs swept east to India and west to France, subjugating Persia, Egypt and Spain. Within 100 years, they won an empire bigger than the one the Romans had built up in 600 years, and they commanded the world's trade routes from Canton to Cordova...
History was well along before it occurred to anybody that there were two ways of looking at war. War was war -bloody, awful, sometimes glorious-and the normal way in which a nation established itself in the days when Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Persia were harrying each other for territory and tribute. Aggression invariably had the sanction of a deity. The Israelites' takeover of the Canaanites was commanded by Jehovah himself. And wars were usually as total as soldiers with limited technology could make them...
...saints. Each Apostle bears his symbol, or the tools of his martyrdom: St. John holds a cup symbolic of the poisoned wine he was ordered to drink; St. Bartholomew is shown with a knife to signify his being flayed alive; St. Simon carries the saw that sundered him in Persia...
...going tugboat fleet, they tell some beguiling yarns about a young captain, name of Martinus Harinxma. Once, lost in a fog in a minefield, he unerringly determined his ship's position by tasting a sample of sea bottom brought up by the lead; while towing the Shah of Persia's yacht to the Caspian Sea via Russia, he smuggled two girls aboard at Stockholm and kept an orgy going in the Shah's big oval bed during the crossing to Leningrad...
Poppy's plot is poppycock. Two U.N narcotics agents (Howard and Marshall) assigned to trace a shipment of radio activated opium from the poppy field of Persia to the junk shops of Harlem whip out their trusty Geiger counter and go lickety-click from Teheran to Geneva to Naples to Nice. En route they run a grim gauntlet of all-too-familiar thriller scenes (bang-bang on the Blue Train, hugger-mugger on the bad guy's yacht, hack-the-stripper in a nudie nightspot) and unpleasantly overripe chestnuts ("How'll we get there-take the midnight...