9. Hope You Enjoyed Your Stay in Paradise. If You Would Like to Come Back…
In their pleasure gardens, the Assassins plied their young prospects with wine, kept them high on hash, and fed them mouth-watering delicacies that most recruits never knew existed, let alone tasted. In the meantime, their sexy temptresses would convince each besotted and befuddled youth that he was in paradise, that his seductresses were the houris promised those who made it into the Muslim heaven. Then, after days of wallowing in delights and indulging in the pleasures of paradise, the young man would be drugged senseless once more, and removed from the gardens.
He would awake back in his bare cell and austere surroundings, and informed that he had been in paradise, sent there by the grace of the Old Man of the Mountain, who held the keys to heaven. The recruit would then be told that he could return to paradise, provided he died while killing the Assassins’ enemies. It was extremely effective: suicide squads of horny young fanatics, high on hash and desperate to die while killing the cult’s enemies, descended from the Assassins’ mountain holdfasts to terrorize the Middle East.
