ABSTRACT
THUS far only merchants have been considered, and their manner of travel across the Badiet esh-Shem. But one must not assume that all those who voyaged between Syria and Mesopotamia were bound to follow the orthodox routes of commerce. Nor was all desert travel bound to conform to the elaborate and conventional pattern of the great caravans. Many European travellers, as has been p'reviously noted, chose to travel independendy. Some of them preferred a voyage down one of the great rivers, or a round-about journey to Baghdad (across northern Mesopotamia), to the direct desert crossing. Others had no particular objection to travelling with a small merchant caravan. The smaller kqfilas, although their procedure and organization was closely modelled upon that of the great caravans, were free to vary their routes; and they were correspondingly more flexible in the matter of the daily routine. Such flexibility was even more pronounced in the case of the small, privately hired caravans which were independent of the exigencies of commerce. In any case, a prospective transdesert traveller was able to select his own variation of the route, and could decide upon his own mode of travel: neither the one nor the other was preordained.
