They are obliged to use great precautions to prevent the caravan from introducing that dreadful distemper, the plague, into the places through which they pass, or from being themselves infected with it. When therefore they arrive near a town, the inhabitants of the town and the people of the caravan hold a solemn conference concerning the state of their health, and very sincerely communicate to each other the state of the case, candidly informing each other whether there be danger on either side.—When there is reason to suspect any contagious distemper, they amicably agree that no communication whatever shall take place between them; and if the caravan stands in need of provisions, they are conveyed to them with the utmost caution over the walls of the town.
The fatigues, hardships, and hazards, attending those caravans, are so great, that they certainly would never be undertaken, if the amazing profits did not in some measure counterbalance them.—The merchant who travels in them must be content with such provisions as he can get, must part with all his delicacies, and give up all hope of ease; he must submit to the frightful confusion of languages and nations; the fatigues of long marches over sands, and under a climate almost sufficiently hot to reduce him to a cinder: he must submit cheerfully to exorbitant duties fraudulently levied, and audacious robberies and subtle tricks practised by the herd of vagabonds who follow the caravans—for preventing which, the merchants have a variety of well contrived locks, that can only be opened by those who know the knack of them.
But in some tracks of caravans there are dangers, and horrible ones, against which no human foresight or power can provide, and beneath which whole caravans sink, and are never after heard of.
The Egyptian caravans are particularly subject to hazards in the horrid tracks they are necessarily obliged to take through sandy deserts, where, for boundless extents, nature has denied one single circumstance of favour; where a blade of grass never grew, nor a drop of water ever ran; where the scorching fire of the sun has banished the kindly influence of the other elements; where, for several days journey, no object meets the eye to guide the parched traveller in his way; and where the casual track of one caravan is closed by the moving sands, before another can come to take advantage of it. In those vast plains of burning sands, if the guide should happen to lose his way, the provision of water, so necessary to carry them to the place where they are to find more, must infallibly fail them: in such a case the mules and horses die with fatigue and thirst; and even the camels, notwithstanding their extraordinary power to subsist without water, soon perish in the same manner, together with the people of the caravan, wandering in those frightful deserts.
But more dreadful still, and still more inevitable, is the danger when a south wind happens to rise in those sandy deserts. The least mischief it occasions is, to dry up the leathern bags which contain the provision of water for the journey. This wind, to which the Arabs give the epithet of poisoned, often stifles in a moment those who have the misfortune to meet it; to prevent which, they are obliged to throw themselves immediately on the ground, putting their faces close to the burning sands which surround them on all sides, and covering their mouths with some linen cloth, lest by breathing they should swallow instantaneous death, which this wind carries with it wherever it extends.—Besides which, whole caravans are often buried under moving hills of burning sand, raised by the agitation of the winds.
All those horrors and dangers are so exquisitely described by our charming bard Thomson, that I cannot refrain from transcribing the passage, as bringing them more immediately home to the understanding and the heart, than volumes of common description could do.
———— Breathed hot
From all the boundless furnace of the sky,
And the wide glittering waste of burning sand,
A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites