As they traveled, the prince’s party had occasion to talk with King Armandor’s soldiers and ask them about the nature of the land they were about to visit, but they received few satisfactory answers. It was not that the soldiers were uncooperative, but rather that so little was known about Punjar. Few people ever visited it, and of those who did, even fewer returned to talk about it. If anything, conditions had grown harsher and more forbidding than they’d been in Ali Maimun’s time, and the Punjari were not inclined to travel beyond their boundaries. The rest of the world would have ignored Punjar completely were it not for the riches buried within those mountains.
The kingdom of Punjar was noted as the source for the finest gems in the world; its tunnel-dwelling citizens were constantly
