While On Our Journey Through The Desert,
We Used To Lend Flesh To Each Other, So As Never To Carry Any From
Station To Station, Being Repaid Next Day By Those To Whom We Lent The
Day Before.
From Babylon to Aleppo is 40 days journey, of which 36 days are through
the desert or wilderness, in which neither trees, houses, nor
inhabitants are anywhere to be seen, being all an uniform extended plain
or dreary waste, with no object whatever to relieve the eye.
On the
journey, the pilots or guides go always in front, followed by the
caravan in regular order. When the guides stop, all the caravan does the
same, and unloads the camels, as the guides know where wells are to be
found. I have said that the caravan takes 36 days to travel across the
wilderness; besides these, for the two first days after leaving Babylon
we go past inhabited villages, till such time as we cross the Euphrates;
and then we have two days journey through among inhabited villages
before reaching Aleppo. Along with each caravan there is a captain, who
dispenses justice to all men, and every night there is a guard
appointed to keep watch for the security of the whole. From Aleppo we
went to Tripoli, in Syria, where M. Florinasca, M. Andrea Polo, and I,
with a friar in company, hired a bark to carry us towards Jerusalem. We
accordingly sailed from Tripoli to Jaffa, from which place we travelled
in a day and a half to Jerusalem, leaving orders that the bark should
wait for our return.
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