“…then he was through the cordon and racing into deeper darkness while the demoralized pack howled behind him.”
-The Daughter of Erlik Khan
The cordon was a standard defensive military arrangement of armies of the black powder era who feared an exploratory or probing attack or outflanking maneuver by the enemy. Best suited for defending river lines, it was not a defense in depth, as indicated in the above passage.
1. cor•don
[ˈkôrdn]
NOUN
cordons (plural noun)
1. a line or circle of police, soldiers, or guards preventing access to or from an area or building: a picket line
2. an ornamental cord or braid.
3. architecture
another term for stringcourse.
VERB
cordons (third person present) • cordoned (past tense) • cordoned (past participle) • cordoning (present participle)
4. (cordon off)
prevent access to or from (an area or building) by surrounding it with police or guards:
ORIGIN
late Middle English, an ornamental braid: from Italian cordone, augmentative of corda, and French cordon, diminutive of corde, both from Latin chorda ‘string, rope’. Sense 3 of the noun, the earliest of the current noun senses, dates from the early 18th cent.
Waking Up in Indian Country: Harm City: 2015
