The superior, Father Marie-Joseph, took the general at his word. Poor as Job, he borrowed money enough to hire a camel and alone, with a single Arab and a sack of dates and a leather bottle of water, he started for Aleppo on the long journey--nearly eight hundred miles--through the inhospitable Arabian and Syrian deserts. Twice his alertness and eloquence saved him from bands of marauding Bedouins. But, finally, after untold difficulties and sufferings he reached Aleppo and Rome. His superior general in the Eternal City was so impressed by the magnificent audacity of the zealous missionary that he found a means of procuring for him the assistants he so much needed and sent him back to his flock rejoicing. Among these assistants was Father Damien, formerly a practicing physician, who soon proved to be a godsend to the suffering poor of Bagdad, whom he gladly treated and supplied with medicine without any compensation whatever.[422] As in the missions of Edessa and Mosul, the missionaries of Bagdad are nobly assisted in their moral and civilizing work by devoted nuns from France. But the life of these devoted sisters is one of the greatest self-sacrifice. They may not, as did the Carmelite priests, have attempted to imitate St. Peter of Alcantara, who took but one repast and that of the most frugal kind, only once every three days; but the privations which they for years had to endure would daunt all but the most courageous souls. Even before they reached the scene of their missionary activities they had to pass through an experience that, for delicately reared women as they were, was truly disheartening for any but those engaged in the service of the Master. This was their long journey on horseback--in great part--through a wild and forbidding desert from Beirut to Bagdad. They were twenty-four days in the saddle. The nights they had to spend in the filthy, noisy, dilapidated caravansaries which were scarcely fit shelter for the beasts that carried them. And yet these heroic _religieuses_ always maintained the same cheerfulness during this long and trying journey as ever characterizes them in the performance of their arduous labors in the schoolroom and at the bedside of the sick and suffering.[423] But the labors of these ardent souls is not without compensation, even in this world. Notwithstanding all the drawbacks that confront them they have the comfort of knowing that their sacrifices are not in vain. The number of their pupils, Mohammedans and Jews, as well as Christians of all the numerous rites in Mesopotamia, is so rapidly augmenting, that it is difficult for the good nuns to house them and secure enough teachers to take care of them. For, in addition to the ordinary branches of an elementary education, they teach their young charges various kinds of needlework and the simpler principles of domestic economy.