time of the Russian advance.
[45]The military rockets devised by Sir William Congreve were used in the War of 1812, and those described by Flashman were obviously similar to this early pattern, which continued in use for many years. The Congreve was a gigantic sky-rocket, consisting of an iron cylinder four inches in diameter and over a yard long, packed with powder and attached to a fifteen-foot stick. It was fired from a slanting trough or tube, and travelled with a tremendous noise and a great trail of smoke and sparks, exploding on impact. Although they could fly two miles, the rockets were extremely erratic, and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century frequent modifications were made, including William Hale's spinning rocket, and the grooved and finned rocket, which could be fired without a stick.
[46]The secret society of Assassins, founded in Persia in the eleventh century by Hassan el Sabbah, 'the Old Man of the Mountains', were notorious for their policy of secret murder and their addiction to the hashish drug from which they took their name. At their height they operated from hill strongholds, mostly in Persia and Syria, and were active against the Crusaders before being dispersed by the Mongol invasion of Hulagu Khan in the thirteenth century. Traces of the sect exist today in the Middle East.
