The pilots had difficulty in finding their way between the shallows and the rocks, and even the voyage in Roman waters from Arsinoe to Leuce Come cost many vessels and men. Here the winter was passed; in the spring of 730 the campaign in the enemy’s country began. The Arabians offered no hindrance, but Arabia undoubtedly did so. Wherever the double axes and the slings and bows came into collision with the pilum and the sword, the natives dispersed like chaff before the wind; but the diseases, which are endemic in the country, scurvy, leprosy, palsy, decimated the soldiers worse than the most bloody battle, and all the more as the general did not know how to move rapidly forward the unwieldy mass of his army. Nevertheless the Roman army arrived in front of the walls of Mariaba, the capital of the Sabaeans first affected by the attack. But, as the inhabitants closed the gates of their powerful walls still standing,[265] and offered energetic resistance, the Roman general despaired of solving the problem proposed to him; and, after he had lain six days in front of the town, he entered on his retreat, which the Arabians hardly disturbed in earnest, and which was accomplished with comparative rapidity under the pressure of need, although with a severe loss in men. [Sidenote: Further enterprises against the Arabs.] It was a bad miscarriage; but Augustus did not abandon the conquest of Arabia. It has already been related (p. 39) that the journey to the East, which the crown-prince Gaius entered upon in the year 753 {1 B.C.}, was to terminate at Arabia; it was this time contemplated after the subjugation of Armenia to reach, in concert with the Parthian government or in case of need after the overthrow of their armies, the mouth of the Euphrates, and from thence to take the sea-route which the admiral Nearchus had once explored for Alexander, towards Arabia Felix.[266] These hopes ended in another but not less unfortunate way, through the Parthian arrow which struck the crown-prince before the walls of Artageira. With him was buried the plan of Arabian conquest for all the future. The great peninsula remained through the whole imperial period--apart from the stripes of coast on the north and north-west--in possession of that freedom from which Islam, the executioner of Hellenism, was in its own time to issue. [Sidenote: Injury to Arabian commerce.]