It is difficult for the modern traveler as he passes along the present overland routes between Aleppo and Basra to form any true conception of the stupendous scale on which the old caravan trade between the two emporia was formerly conducted. Although the distance between the two places is nearly eight hundred miles and most of the road passes through the inhospitable Syrian and Arabian deserts and the difficulties to be encountered, at the time of which we are speaking, were as grave as they were manifold, the number of merchants and capitalists who ventured fortune and life in this forbidding and dangerous part of the world seems almost incredible. And the magnitude of the caravans and the value of the merchandise they transported in a single journey was yet more astonishing. In the caravan with which Della Valle traveled there were, he informs us,[270] fifteen hundred persons and forty or more large tents. That of the celebrated French traveler, Tavernier, counted six hundred camels and four hundred men. When in 1745 the Englishman, William Beawes, crossed the desert there were two thousand camels! But this was far less than the number that was in the caravan of his countryman, John Eldred, when a century and a half earlier he made the journey from Bagdad to Aleppo with four thousand camels “laden with spices and other rich merchandise.” But the largest of these caravans was much smaller than the one which in 1750 went from Bagdad to Aleppo and which was composed of five thousand camels and eleven hundred men. When trade between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean was most brisk, caravans of from two to five thousand camels crossed the desert twice a year between Aleppo and Bagdad. The Dutch traveler, John Huyghen Van Linschoten, attributes the great prosperity of Ormuz to the fact that it was located on the great trade route to India.[271] The value of the merchandise carried by these caravans was often very great. Thus we are told of the caravan of an English trader, one Carmichael, which consisted of thirty mules, fifty horses, and twelve hundred camels, “six hundred of which were laden with merchandise valuing nearly 300,000 pounds. The caravans that carried on the trade between Aleppo and Mocha were,” in the words of a writer of the time, “esteemed indifferently rich if they carry less than two million dollars or one hundred thousand ducats of gold either Hungarian, Venetian, or Moorish.”