Cities and features

Grand Palace of Arrakeen and dunes of Arrakis from Frank Herbert's "The Road to Dune" (1985), illustrated by Jim Burns

ARRAKEEN: first settlement on Arrakis; long-time seat of planetary government. — Dune, Terminology of the Imperium

Arrakis' capital and largest city historically is Arrakeen (/ærəˈkiːn/[1]). Arrakeen housed an ostentatious palace, which had been "the government mansion in the days of the Old Empire";[4] prior to the arrival of the Atreides on Arrakis, the Emperor's right-hand man Count Fenring and his wife Margot had resided there. Leto I had chosen Arrakeen for his seat of government because it "was a smaller city, easier to sterilize and defend."[4]

In Dune, Leto's concubine Lady Jessica has this first impression of the Great Hall:

Jessica stood in the center of the hall [...] looking up and around at shadowed carvings, crannies and deeply recessed windows. This giant anachronism of a room reminded her of the Sisters' Hall at her Bene Gesserit school. But at the school the effect had been of warmth. Here, all was bleak stone. Some architect had reached far back into history for these buttressed walls and dark hangings, she thought. The arched ceiling stood two stories above her with great crossbeams she felt sure had been shipped here to Arrakis across space at monstrous cost. No planet of this system grew trees to make such beams—unless the beams were imitation wood. She thought not.[4]

Arrakeen would go through multiple transformations over time; it first becomes an Imperial capital of staggering proportions under Paul Muad'Dib. It is later transformed into a festival city known as Onn, explicitly for the worship of the Tyrant Leto II. Finally, in the centuries after his death, it is known as Keen, a modern (though still impressive) city to house the Priesthood of Rakis.[9]

In Dune, Sietch Tabr is a major Fremen sietch originally led by Naib Stilgar. Paul Atreides and his mother Lady Jessica, safely escaping from the Harkonnen attack, come upon Sietch Tabr and are eventually accepted into the community. In these Fremen Paul finds an incomparable fighting force who are already disgruntled by Imperial rule. He shapes them into a resistance movement that eventually takes control of Arrakis, allowing Paul to depose the Emperor. Paul moves his base of operations to Arrakeen, but Sietch Tabr remains a center of Fremen culture and politics, as well as a religiously significant site for those who worship Paul as a messiah. All Fremen sietches but one are abandoned after the terraforming of Arrakis, their exact locations remaining a mystery for thousands of years.

During the reign of Muad'Dib until the ascension of his son Leto II, the Atreides home-base was a colossal megastructure in Arrakeen, designed to intimidate, known as the Keep. In Dune Messiah, the fortress is described as being large enough to enclose entire cities.

Grand Palace of Arrakeen

Your walking tour of Arrakis must include this approach across the dunes to the Grand Palace at Arrakeen. From a distance, the dimensions of this construction are deceptive [...] The largest man-made structure ever built, the Grand Palace could cover more than ten of the Imperium's most populous cities under one roof, a fact that becomes more apparent when you learn Atreides attendants and their families, housed spaciously in the Palace Annex, number some thirty-five million souls [...] When you walk into the Grand Reception Hall of the Palace at Arrakeen, be prepared to feel dwarfed before an immensity never before conceived. A statue of St. Alia Atreides, shown as "The Soother of Pains," stands twenty-two meters tall but is one of the smallest adornments in the hall. Two hundred such statues could be stacked one atop the other against the entrance pillars and still fall short of the doorway's capitol arch, which itself is almost a thousand meters below the first beams upholding the lower roof.

Temple of Alia

Edit

Alia's Fane (or Alia's Temple) is the two-kilometer wide temple Paul-Muad'Dib built for his sister Alia between the events of Dune and Dune Messiah. Herbert described it in The Road to Dune:

If you are numbered among "the heartfelt pilgrims," you will cross the last thousand meters of this approach to the Temple of Alia on your knees. Those thousand meters fall well within the sweeping curves leading your eyes up to the transcendent symbols dedicating this Temple to St. Alia of the Knife. The famed "Sun-Sweep Window" incorporates every solar calendar known to human history in the one translucent display whose brilliant colors, driven by the sun of Dune, thread through the interior on prismatic pathways.

The Citadel of Leto II

Edit

The Tyrant Leto II rules the universe from the Citadel, a fortress built in the Last Desert of the Sareer. The Sareer is flanked by the Forbidden Forest, home of the ferocious D-wolves, the guardians of the Sareer. Beyond that lies the Idaho River, across which a bridge spans that leads to the festival city of Onn (once Arrakeen). Mount Idaho had been completely demolished to provide the raw materials to build the high walls surrounding the Sareer.[11] The Citadel itself is taken apart in the Famine Times after the death of Leto II in search of his alleged hoard of spice.

Other locations

Edit

All Imperial cities on Arrakis are in the far-northern latitudes of the planet and protected from the violent weather of Arrakis by a natural formation known as the Shield Wall. When the Harkonnens controlled the planet, they ruled from the Harkonnen-built "megalopolis" of Carthag, described by Jessica as "a cheap and brassy place some two hundred kilometers northeast across the Broken Land."[4] Arrakeen was merely the titular capital until the arrival of the Atreides.

There are other cities scattered in the northern regions of the planet (especially near the ice cap, where water is harvested), as well as the Fremen sietch communities scattered throughout the desert.

Other notable sites on Arrakis throughout its history include Observatory Mountain, Mount Idaho, Dar-es-balat and the Kynes Sea.

Prequels

Edit

The novel Paul of Dune (2008) by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson establishes that the first known inhabitants of Arrakis had been the Muadru, who introduced the sandworms to the planet. They had settlements all over the galaxy which suddenly disappeared; the Zensunni Wanderers came later, ultimately becoming the Fremen. In the novel Paul notes, "There appears to be a linguistic connection between the Fremen and the Muadru."[12]