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.
Doughty in his Travels in Arabia Deserta gives us a most picturesque description of a pilgrim caravan which he was allowed to accompany over what he calls “the old gold and frankincense caravan path to Arabia the Happy.” This, he declares, “is the most considerable desert caravan in the Eastern World.” The caravan with which he journeyed was, he tells us, composed of “a slow-footed multitude” of six thousand persons, ten thousand camels, mules, hackneys, asses, and dromedaries, nearly two miles long with a breadth in the desert of about one hundred yards.[274]
During the last few years, however, the Hedjaz Railroad has in great measure taken the place of the large pilgrim caravans that formerly went from Syria to the two sacred cities of Arabia. The northern terminus of this road is at Aleppo. Although it is planned to extend it to Mecca, it has so far been completed only to Medina. Its construction is chiefly due to the late Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, who saw in it a power-means of furthering the projects of Pan-Islamism. The Shah of Persia, the Khedive of Egypt, and the Sherif and Ulema of Mecca cordially joined in this great enterprise. Contribution from rich and poor towards the work came in from all parts of the Moslem world. Lucknow contributed $140,000; Madras and Rangoon, $300,000; while an Indian Prince spent no less than $200,000 on the Medina station alone. No fewer than seven thousand soldiers were engaged in the construction of this railway which was to combine the two most holy cities of the Mohammedan world more closely to the Osmanli Caliphate than ever before and which was to further the cause of Pan-Islamism more effectively than could anything else whatever.
One feature of the Hedjaz Railway trains, which strongly appeals to the devout pilgrims, is its prayer car. For them it is virtually a mosque on wheels. But the majority of the pilgrims appreciate the road still more because it enables them to reach the sacred cities of their heart’s desire without incurring the many fatigues and dangers that are incident to the slow-moving caravans. For what with the plague, the cholera, the treacherous Bedouins, and the exposure to the withering desert sun the mortality of the pilgrims to Mecca is enormous.
To the observant traveler in the East few things are more interesting than to contemplate the pilgrim caravan as it
Winds slowly in one line interminable
Of camel after camel,
or is more suggestive of serious thoughts regarding Moslem belief and practice.