The Persian princess must have felt that she wasn't going to get much further. The white stallion carried her eastwards at a furious gallop, across the vanished empire of her dead father, the last shah of the proud ruling house of the Sassanids. The wild flight has led them away from the Mesopotamia plain, through the mountains of Kurdistan, up to the Iranian high plateau in front of the gates of the old royal city of Ray, the caliph's captors always hard on their heels.

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