By night the stars served them for guides; but when these brilliant signals were swallowed up in the light of the sun, they then had recourse to the slight variations in the surface of the plain, imperceptible to other eyes, to the appearance or absence of certain plants, and even to the smell of the soil, by all which signs they always knew exactly where they were. At length, after a toilsome and dangerous march of fifteen days, they arrived upon the banks of the Euphrates, a little after sunrise, and pitched their tents in the midst of clumps of cypress and small cedar-trees. On the following night, as soon as the moon began to silver over the waters of the Euphrates, the caravan again put itself in motion; and, descending along the course of the stream, in six days arrived at Anah, a city of the Arabs, lying on both sides of the river, whose broad surface is here dotted with numerous small islands covered with fruit-trees. They now crossed the river; and the merchants of the caravan, avoiding the safe and commodious road which lay through towns in which custom-house officers were found, struck off into a desolate and dangerous route, traversing Mesopotamia nearly in a right line, and on the 19th of October reached the banks of the Tigris, a larger and more rapid river than the Euphrates, though on this occasion Pietro thought its current less impetuous. The night before they entered Bagdad the caravan was robbed in a very dexterous manner. Their tents were pitched in the plain, the officers of the custom-house posted around to prevent smuggling; the merchants, congratulating themselves that they had already succeeded in eluding the duties almost to the extent of their desires, had fallen into the sound sleep which attends on a clear conscience; and Pietro, his domestics, and the other inmates of the caravan had followed their example. In the dead of the night the camp was entered by stealth, the tents rummaged, and considerable booty carried off. The banditti, entering Pietro’s tent, and finding all asleep, opened the trunk in which were all the manuscripts, designs, and plans he had made during his travels, carefully packed up, as if for the convenience of robbers, in a small portable escrutoire; but by an instinct which was no less fortunate for them than for the traveller and posterity, since such spoil could have been of no value to them, they rejected the escrutoire, and selected all our traveller’s fine linen, the very articles in which he hoped to have captivated the beauty whose eulogies had so highly inflamed his imagination. A Venetian, who happened to be in the camp, had his arquebuse stolen from under his head, and this little incident, as it tended to show that the robbers had made still more free with others than with him, somewhat consoled Pietro for the loss of his linen. As the traveller does not himself attach any suspicion to the military gentlemen of the custom-house, it might, perhaps, be uncharitable to deposite the