ABSTRACT
When it had come to actually planning our journey, however, a number of difficulties at once began to show themselves. It was surprising how little information was to be got, even from the sources of geographical knowledge most respected in England. Bradshaw, whom we naturally consulted first, held out the golden hope of a regular line of land communications through Aleppo, while cn his map a railway route was freely traced ; but it was more than doubtful whether all this could be taken literally, and whether the absence of dates and tariffs in the account did not point to the advertisement of some future scheme rather than to a statement of existing facts. At the Boyal Geographical Society's rooms, to which we next turned, we were shown the maps and surveys made by Colonel Chesney in 1836, as the latest on the subject, no traveller connected with the Society having visited the Euphrates valley since that date, unless it might be Mr. Layard or Colonel Bawlinson.
