The foregoing statements are illuminating in the information supplied respecting the size of the caravans and the amount of merchandise they transported, but they give us no idea of the great fatigues and dangers that were incurred in the long journeys through the cheerless deserts which were inhabited for the most part by hostile and plunder-seeking Bedouins. The Venetian traveler, Cæsar Frederick, throws some light on the character of the country which the caravans had to traverse. Returning in 1581 from his long wanderings of eighteen years in India and beyond he tells us that: From Babilon to Aleppo is forty days’ journey, in which they make thirty-six days over the Wilderness, in which thirty-six days they neither see houses, trees nor people that inhabit it, but only a plaine and no signe of any way in the world.... I say in thirty-six dayes we passe over the wildernesse. For when we depart from Babilon two dayes wee passe by villages inhabited until we have passed the river Euphrates. And then within two dayes of Aleppo we have villages inhabited.[272] As a precaution against attacks by Arab robbers, Pietro della Valle informs us that it was always necessary to post at night a strong guard around the caravan. “During the entire night this guard runs around the camp shouting--as is their custom--to their friends to be on the alert and their enemies to keep away.”[273] How conducive to sleep was all this to the anxious and way-worn members of the caravan! But _While beasts and men together o’er the plain_ _Moved on--a mighty caravan of pain_, they were not entirely cut off from the rest of the world. Although it was long generations before the invention of the telegraph and the telephone, they were able to keep up communication with their friends by means of homing pigeons of which the caravan bashis released one every other day of the journey through the desert. By means of these pigeons, which had been used in the East since the days of the Crusades, the leaders of caravans, Linschoten records, were able to keep up regular communication not only with Bagdad, Basra, and Aleppo but also with far distant Constantinople. Although the great camel trains which were formerly so indispensable to the merchant of the Levant have long given place to the lines of steamships that now connect the East and the West by way of the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope, the Syrian and Arabian deserts still witness as large caravans as were ever known in the most flourishing period of overland traffic between Aleppo and Bagdad. Such caravans are now, however, but little used for the purpose of commerce but rather for transporting the countless thousands of pious pilgrims who annually visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.