Andur an aerial view

Getting back to posting information related to my Andur dreamscape. Although I have had dreams about the Sultan's city since 1995 it was only after I had been there many years that got an aerial view of the city. After all in Andur I am either a 5' 2" raccoon morph or an 8.5" tall mouse morph. Not a blue pegasus pony. However once Petina started funding the construction of mouse-sized gliders it was possible to finally get a view of the city from above. This is what I remember from the time Petina took me up for a flight.

Andur is a city built upon five terraced steps with the Sultan's Palace being at the top. Each of the five levels has its own walls. These are for defense but they also help protect against erosion and landslides. Each level has fortified gates to them.

Most of Andur's 120,000 inhabitants live in two or three story dwelling modeled roughly on old roman designs of apartments. This is not too surprising since for about a 100 years Andur was once part of Imperial Rome. In fact two of the most important elements of the city's infrastructure have their roots in Rome's history. The aqueduct and the sewers.

The Aqueduct is the tallest structure in the city and comes in from the north through the mountains and spans across two of the levels. There the water enters a central station where it distributed out through underground pipelines that radiate out in a semi-circle like spokes from a hub. These feed into cisterns that in turn feed out to the many fountains and baths. The fountains provide much of the water for the neighborhoods although most dwellings have their own cisterns to save and collect rainwater. Also there are two Artesian wells and a river that run through the city.

The sewers take advantage of the natural slopes in the city and feed out of Andur and into large pits to the south, and down wind, of the city. The pits were originally from where people mined for clay back in the days of Malakakar. Andur's original name. At first the sewers just dumped into the bay; with of course bad results for the bay. Eventually a particular type of fish that the then ruling Sultan loved to eat stopped appearing. In a moment lucidity and empirical knowledge he decided that the beautiful fish that he so enjoyed didn't like swimming in filth! Make the sewage go some place else, and since he was the Sultan well..... he got his way and the sewage was redirected to the old clay pits and the fish he loved to eat came back in few years.

In many ways Andur proved to be a challenge for the Roman Engineers since its location defied the preferred Roman grid system for laying out streets. On the Grand Plateau you can see where they tried their hardest to put the stamp of Rome on the street grid.

For most of Malakar's history, both the old and new one, the city was generally located in the top three levels. As the time passed and the city grew it eventually crept down the slope until its outer curtain wall is right against the wharves.