Caravan Travel Quotes

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.

I probably did too much thinking in India. I blame it on the roads, for they were superb...

Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the black sky. If this is not so, meet me in the shameful yard, and we will plant a gallows tree, and swing like sad pendulums, never once touching.

We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in a lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.

Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.

No doubt you are wondering what you will find, out there.' The Commandant said it for me. 'Well, it would be useless for me to try and tell you. The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it...

No one can survive alone – except the Almighty God. And remember, in the desert of life, the fool travels alone and the wise by caravan.

All of us,' he said, 'have hopes of being poet, artist, discoverer, philospoher, scientist; of possessing the attributes of all these simultaneously. Few are permitted to achieve any of them in daily life. But in travel we attain them all. Then we have our day of glory, when all our dreams come true, when we can be anything we like, as long as we like, and, when we are tired of it, pull up stakes and move on. Travel -- the solitude of the mountains, the emptiness of the desert, the delicacy of the minaret; eternal change, limitless contrast, unending variety.' (Eric Lang)

Once the caravan reached the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal Range, in the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent, Jesus continued the journey with a small group of locals until he completed the last leg on his own, guided from one place to another by the local people. Some weeks later, he made it to the Indian Himalayan region where Jesus was greeted by some Buddhist monks and with whom he sojourned for some time. From that location, he then went to live in the city of Rishikesh, in India's northern state of Uttarakhand, spending most of his time meditating in a cave known as Vashishta Gufa, on the banks of the River Ganga. Jesus lived in those lands for many months before he continued traveling to the northeast, until he arrived in the Kingdom of Magadha, in what is presently West-central Bihar. It so happened that it was here, in Magadha, that Jesus met Mari for the first time, the woman better known today as Mary Magdalene...

These days, we've got booksellers in cities, in deserts, and in the middle of a rain forest; we've got travelling bookshops, and bookshops underground. We've got bookshops in barns, in caravans and in converted Victorian railway stations. We've even got booksellers selling books in the middle of a war. Are bookshops still relevant? They certainly are. All bookshops are full of stories, and stories want to be heard.

...all the disadvantages of good roads: high speed, and almost total lack of that inspiring factor in travel -- the welcoming hand of the interested stranger.

I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand.

You travel faster alone, but farther together.

Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea. When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair. In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, and half-revealed. Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts.

But wherever there is man, there must be some sort of route

Much travel is needed before the raw man is ripened.

Gypsies, as you know, often seem sinister to the rest of us, but that's only because they have character. Travelling from town to town, living in caravans, buying or selling whatever is at hand. The adventure of it all

If you want to know what surrealism means, watch the camel caravans traveling in the desert under the moonlight!

...it was if another planet were calling. The call, embodied, issued in liquid syllables from the mouth of the Arab sailor who, on the prow of the Vestra each sun-up, looked toward the East and sang the Persian song: Hearken unto dawn, oh, my soul... Let good come unto the world.

I Have Walked Down Many Roads by Antonio Machado translated from the Spanish by Don Share I have walked down many roads and cleared many paths; I have navigated a hundred oceans and anchored off a hundred shores. All over, I have seen caravans of sadness, pompous and melancholy men drunk with black shadows, and defrocked pedants who stare, keep quiet, and think they know, because they don’t drink wine in the neighborhood bars. Bad people who go around polluting the earth . . . And all over, I have seen people who dance or play, when they can, and work their four handfuls of land. If they turn up someplace, they never ask where they are. When they travel, they ride on the backs of old mules, and don’t know how to hurry, not even on holidays. When there’s wine, they drink wine; when there’s no wine, they drink cool water. These are good people, who live, work, get by, and dream; and on a day like all the others they lie down under the earth.

It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land. And along with all that, Baikal is distinctly Asiatic: if a camel caravan could somehow transport Baikal across Siberia to Europe, and curious buyers unwrapped it in a marketplace, none would mistake it for a lake from around there.

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.

It was difficult to say which were the more dismal, these deserted streets that wandered away to right and left, or the great main thoroughfare with its narcotic and shadowy life. For the latter appeared vast, interminable, grey, and those who travelled by it were scarcely real, the bodies of the living, but rather the uncertain and misty shapes that come sand go across the desert in an Eastern tale, when men look up from the sand and see a caravan pass them, all in silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they passed and repassed each other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, each intent on his own secret, and wrapped in obscurity.

O lovers, lovers it is time to set out from the world. I hear a drum in my soul's ear coming from the depths of the stars. Our camel driver is at work; the caravan is being readied. He asks that we forgive him for the disturbance he has caused us, He asks why we travelers are asleep. Everywhere the murmur of departure; the stars, like candles thrust at us from behind blue veils, and as if to make the invisible plain, a wondrous people have come forth.

Most people think of the mind as located in the head, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that the mind doesn't really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormones and enzymes, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, and vision.

In London it had seemed impossible to travel without the proper evening clothes. One could see an invitation arriving for an Embassy ball or something. But on the other side of Europe with the first faint tinges of faraway places becoming apparent and exciting, to say nothing of vanishing roads and extra weight, Embassy balls held less significance.

TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky.

in the desert of life, the fool travels alone and the wise by caravan.

All three caravans of the Travelling Symphony are labelled as such, THE TRAVELLING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.

And through this distemperature, we see the seasons alter.” All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.

Under Mongol domination, faraway regions of the globe came into contact more than superficially and, for at least a century spanning the mid-1200s to the mid-1300s, these regions were linked in a common network of exchange and production. For the first time, people and caravans could travel safely from Italy to China.

Those of us who make the sea our home carry libraries in our head, a fact I have tried to impress upon many a land-dwelling intellectual. The scholars who travel the world to study could learn just as much if they would speak to the sailors, porters, and caravan hands who ferry them and their books to such faraway lands.

The team’s caravan traveled over difficult roads as American bombs fell. The car ahead of the one carrying Jonathan and Leah crashed. Jonathan and Leah remember the horror of seeing their friends thrown from the car. They jumped out to tend their injured colleagues, unsure of how to proceed. Just then some Iraqis stopped by the roadside. Seeing the wounded Americans lying in the ditch, they picked them up. Jonathan recalls, “They carried our bleeding friends to this town called Rutba. When we got there the doctor said, ‘Three days ago your country bombed our hospital. But we will take care of you.’ He sewed up their heads and saved their lives. When I asked the doctor what we owed him for his services, he said, ‘Nothing. Please just tell the world what has happened in Rutba.

1:354-355 BEING TAKEN When you begin to surrender, forget yourself. Become senseless with no motive, so you can be blown from east to west and back without knowing anything, or caring either. It would not be surprising if in such mindlessness your essential being went hundreds of miles without you being aware of it. We see such wandering in the clouds and the waters. The forests and the crops too in their ways travel with caravans of people along the earth. God takes our souls on journeys he knows nothing of. Why? We don't know, being as we are the passed-out reveler laid in a wagon and driven elsewhere. What we love, what we want, is this being held in the presence, this being taken. That is the satisfaction, not learning why or how or where we are, or when we'll arrive somewhere else.

Mecca is a lot farther away than the Pyramids. When I was young, all I wanted to do was put together enough money to start this shop. I thought that someday I’d be rich, and could go to Mecca. I began to make some money, but I could never bring myself to leave someone in charge of the shop; the crystals are delicate things. At the same time, people were passing my shop all the time, heading for Mecca. Some of them were rich pilgrims, traveling in caravans with servants and camels, but most of the people making the pilgrimage were poorer than I. “All who went there were happy at having done so. They placed the symbols of the pilgrimage on the doors of their houses. One of them, a cobbler who made his living mending boots, said that he had traveled for almost a year through the desert, but that he got more tired when he had to walk through the streets of Tangier buying his leather.” “Well, why don’t you go to Mecca now?” asked the boy. “Because it’s the thought of Mecca that keeps me alive. That’s what helps me face these days that are all the same, these mute crystals on the shelves, and lunch and dinner at that same horrible café. I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.

HE WAS KNOWN As DJANGO, a Gypsy name meaning "I awake." His legal name-the name the gendarmes and border officials entered into their journals as his family crisscrossed Europe in their horsedrawn caravan-was jean Reinhardt. But when the family brought their travels to a halt alongside a hidden stream or within a safe wood to light their cookfire, they called him only by his Romany name. Even among his fellow Gypsies, "Django" was a strange name, a strong, telegraphic sentence due to its first-person verb construction. It was a name of which Django was exceedingly proud. It bore an immediacy, a sense of life, and a vision of destiny.

We are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters... A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilization. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana. ... We too shall in our turn be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that laboring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they are now to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several more years to the average length of human life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty workingman. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the splendor of the rich.

A caravan from China comes; For miles it sweetens all the air With fragrant silks and dreaming gums, Attar and myrrh -- A caravan from China comes. O merchant, tell me what you bring, With music sweet of camel bells; How long have you been travelling With these sweet smells? O merchant, tell me what you bring. A lovely lady is my freight, A lock escaped of her long hair, -- That is this perfume delicate That fills the air -- A lovely lady is my freight. Her face is from another land, I think she is no mortal maid, -- Her beauty, like some ghostly hand, Makes me afraid; Her face is from another land. The little moon my cargo is, About her neck the Pleiades Clasp hands and sing; Hafiz, 't is this Perfumes the breeze -- The little moon my cargo is.

The grunt pulled his collar up around his neck. “Butterfinger.” “Yeah.” Queho nodded, a smile spreading across his face. “Butterfinger. Good one. I liked that one. I always got the candy stuck between my teeth. Same with the Heath Bar.” He picked at his teeth with his finger. “Not worth the effort.” The grunt kept pace with Queho. The caravan was traveling more like an amorphous pack. The town’s wide streets accommodated the disorganization as the posse clopped along. Queho was so preoccupied with Dairy Queen, he didn’t notice. “I always got the chocolate chip cookie dough,” Queho said, licking his lips. “Oh, that was good. And remember? They’d hold it upside down?” He held out his hand to pantomime a Dairy Queen clerk holding a cup of ice cream upside down. “That way you knew how thick they made it.” The

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, as in revenge, have sucked up from the sea contagious fogs.…” Pestilential, a note in the text explains, next to the word contagious, in Kirsten’s favorite of the three versions of the text that the Symphony carries. Shakespeare was the third born to his parents, but the first to survive infancy. Four of his siblings died young. His son, Hamnet, died at eleven and left behind a twin. Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape. And now in a twilight once more lit by candles, the age of electricity having come and gone, Titania turns to face her fairy king. “Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger, washes all the air, that rheumatic diseases do abound.” Oberon watches her with his entourage of fairies. Titania speaks as if to herself now, Oberon forgotten. Her voice carries high and clear over the silent audience, over the string section waiting for their cue on stage left. “And through this distemperature, we see the seasons alter.” All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.

Until now travel had always been a fraught affair. Each year until she was sixteen, it had been two weeks fighting with her sister in a caravan in Filey while her parents drank steadily and looked out at the rain, a sort of harsh experiment in the limits of human proximity.

Her rhythms pulse regular and sinusoidal—a freak show in caravan, travelling over thousands of little hills. A serpent hypnotic and undulant, bearing on her back like infinitesimal fleas such hunchbacks, dwarves, prodigies, centaurs, poltergeists! Two-headed, three-eyed, hopelessly in love; satyrs with the skin of werewolves, werewolves with the eyes of young girls and perhaps even an old man with a navel of glass, through which can be seen goldfish nuzzling the coral country of his guts.

But already his mind was racing ahead to his next encounter with humans. There was, he knew, a small encampment of Bedouin nearby. He’d spied their sheep-flocks and their fires from a distance, their men traveling on horseback, but until now he’d avoided them. He wondered, how did their lives differ from those of the caravan-men? Perhaps, instead of finding another caravan to follow, he would turn his wanderings toward their encampment. But should he remain content with observing them from a distance, when a much more intimate option lay available to him?

- J’aidais justement Ghezumi et Kassergh à bâter l’hypocras : du vin au miel avec de la cannelle et du gingembre mélangé à du musc, de l’ambre gris, de la cardamome, du poivre long, de la graine de paradis et de la fleur de muscade. On ne trouve cette variété qu’à Chaz. - J’ignorais que les sujets de Sahr’Lim consommaient l’hypocras, avoua le hérisson géant. - Ha ! Certes non, nous n’en buvons pas ! le détrompa Dazhirk d’un ton affable. Mais cela se vend bien dans l’empire de Tawag, demandez donc à votre compagne. - Effectivement les gens de notre empire en sont friands, affirma Selamawit, et il arrive aussi que les sujets du royaume de Kambu l’achètent quand ils s’approchent de nos frontières. - C’est pourquoi j’en transporte souvent, cela assure déjà les frais de caravane. Mais c’est très délicat au départ, confia Dazhirk avec un regard soucieux vers les lézards géants qui acceptaient docilement leur chargement. - Comment cela ? questionna Nyssa. - Il faut soigneusement sangler les lézards, jeune damoiselle, répondit-il après un silence pendant lequel il scruta attentivement la jeune fille. Ni trop lâche, ni trop serré avec ces reptiles dont le corps se gonfle une fois chargé. Puis, il faut équilibrer très exactement les charges, les envelopper dans une toile épaisse qui les protège de la lumière et de la chaleur, enfin ficeler correctement le tout. Cela fait, on peut alors accomplir des journées entières de voyage sans crainte de semer tout le chargement au long du parcours ou de le renverser, ce qui casserait les récipients et nous ferait perdre notre investissement.

In 1857, to encourage continued settlement of the West, Congress passed the Pacific Wagon Road Act, which among other improvements to the trail called for the surveying of a shorter route to Idaho across the bottom of the Wind Rivers and the forested Bridger-Teton wilderness to the west. Frederick W. Lander, a hotheaded but experienced explorer and engineer, was assigned the job. He made Burnt Ranch the trailhead and main supply depot for the trail-building job, which became one of the largest government-financed projects of the nineteenth century. Lander hired hundreds of workers from the new Mormon settlement at Salt Lake and supplied the enterprise with large mule-team caravans that ferried provisions and equipment from U.S. Army depots in Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. “With crowds of laborers hauling wood, erecting buildings and tending stock,” writes historian Todd Guenther, “the area was a beehive of activity.” The engineers, logging crews, and workers quickly hacked out what became known as the Lander Cutoff, which saved more than sixty miles, almost a week’s travel, across the mountains. In places, the Lander Cutoff was a steep up-and-down ride, but the route offered cooler, high terrain and plentiful water, an advantage over the scorching desert of the main ruts to the south. Eventually an estimated 100,000 pioneers took this route, and the 230-mile Lander Cutoff was considered an engineering marvel of its time. This

A caravan of people were traveling from village to village through the deserts of Rajasthan. Since it was close to sunset, they decided to pitch their tent before the cold night set in. As the men got busy, tying their camels with a rope, they realized that they were short of just one peg and a rope. They were worried about losing their camel in the night and so decided to go to the village headman to seek a solution. The village sarpanch was a wise and intelligent man. The travelers approached him with their problem, “Sir, we are here to ask you for a solution to our problem.” The headman listened to their problem and said, “Go near the camel and pretend as if you are tying it down.” Although they had their doubts, the travelers did just as they were told. To their surprise, the next morning, the camel was right there. He had not moved an inch, forget about going anywhere. They untied the other camels and tents to move on with their journey. But this one wouldn’t move. Fearing something was wrong with him, they went back to the village head. “Did you untie the camel?” asked the village head. “Sir, we had not tied it in the first place.” The headman said, “My dear fellows, that’s what you know. The camel still believes that you had tied him. You pretended to tie him, now pretend to untie him!” The travelers went back to the camel and pretended to untie the rope and remove the peg. They were a picture of amazement seeing the camel get up and move on as if nothing had happened at all. In his own way, the village head had shown the travelers that the rope and peg were just an illusion which the camel thought to be real. In the same way, all of us are bound by our thoughts, which are actually not real but appear to be so. We are conditioned in that direction and are thus unable to experience complete freedom. If we assume that we are born in a middle class family and therefore will remain middle class all our lives, then the ‘middle class’ label will tie us up forever and will not allow us to explore further horizons. If you simply look inward, into your own life, you will see how much you have been conditioned. The realization of being conditioned is the first step towards breaking free from the artificial chains, which are but an illusion. Break free from all the limitations and conditioning that limit you.

Laia, The Soul Catcher tells me I do not have enough time to get Darin out of Kauf if I remain with Afya’s caravan. I’ll move twice as fast if I go ahead on my own, and by the time you reach Kauf, I’ll have found a way to break Darin out. We—or he, at least—will await you in the cave I told Afya about. In case it doesn’t go as planned, use the map of Kauf that I drew and make a plan of your own in the time you have. If I fail, you must succeed—for your brother and for your people. Whatever happens, remember what you told me: There is hope in life. I hope I see you again. —EV Seven sentences. Seven bleeding sentences after weeks of traveling together, of saving each other, of fighting and surviving. Seven sentences and then he disappears like smoke in a north wind.

They had come a long way, those gypsies encamped for their evening meal on the dusty greensward by the winding mountain road in Provence. From Transylvania they had come, from the pustas of Hungary, from the High Tatra of Czechoslovakia, from the Iron Gate, even from as far away as the gleaming Rumanian beaches washed by the waters of the Black Sea. A long journey, hot and stifling and endlessly, monotonously repetitive across the already baking plains of Central Europe or slow and difficult and exasperating and occasionally dangerous in the traversing of the great ranges of mountains that had lain in their way. Above all, one would have thought, even for those nomadic travellers par excellence, a tiring journey. No traces of any such tiredness could be seen in the faces of the gypsies, men, women and children all dressed in their traditional finery, who sat or squatted in a rough semi-circle round two glowing coke braziers, listening in quietly absorbed melancholy to the hauntingly soft and nostalgic tsigane music of the Hungarian steppes. For this apparent

The most precious item travelling the route was silk, which was generated in Serica and packed on caravans in ever-increasing amounts destined for settlements far away—including the capital of the Romans. The silk-laden caravans were nothing new to the old guide; they had been journeying for hundreds of years across watersheds and snow-clad mountain passes of the Zagros and down past his residence. The caravans transporting silk into the Parthian regions in the form of annual tributes or trade were considered “untouchable,” and the repercussions would be murderous due to silk being one of Parthia’s main currencies. Silk was a commodity that knew no recession and held a value high enough that it could be traded for nearly anything. Crassus’s motivation to conquer Parthia was accordingly revealed: he wanted a monopoly on the Road of Silk!

for one morning Susi came running at the top of his speed and gasped out, "An Englishman! I see him!" and off he darted to meet him. The American flag at the head of a caravan told of the nationality of the stranger. Bales of goods, baths of tin, huge kettles, cooking pots, tents, &c, made me think "This must be a luxurious traveller, and not one at his wits' end like me." (28th October, 1871.) It was Henry Moreland Stanley, the travelling correspondent of the New York Herald, sent by James Gordon Bennett, junior, at an expense of more than 4000l., to obtain accurate information about Dr. Livingstone if living, and if dead to bring home my bones. The news he had to tell to one who had been two full years without any tidings from Europe made my whole frame thrill. The

But even during an event as exceptional as the world famous troubadour's just concluded performance, the travelers kept to themselves remaining in clearly delineated groups. Elves stayed with elves. Dwarvish craftsman gathered with their kin who would often hide to protect their merchant caravans and were armed to the teeth. The groups tolerated at best the gnome miners and halfling farmers who camped beside them. All non-humans were uniformly distant towards humans. The humans re-payed in kind but were not seem to mix amongst themselves either. Nobility looked down on the merchants and traveling salesman with open scorn. While soldiers and mercenaries, distanced themselves from shepherds and their reeking sheepskins. The few wizards and their disciples, kept themselves entirely apart from the others and bestowed their arrogance on everyone in equal parts. A tied knit, dark and silent group of peasants lurked in the background resembling a forest with their rakes, pitchforks and flails, poking above their heads. They were ignored by all. The exception, as ever was the children. Freed from the constraints of silence which have been enforced during the bards performance, the children dashed into the woods with wild cries and enthusiastically immersed themselves in a game whose rules were incomprehensible to all those who have bidden farewell to the happy years of childhood. Children of elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, half elves, quarter elves and toddlers of mysterious provenance, neither knew or recognized racial or social divisions. At least, not yet.

A Moment’s Halt—a momentary taste Of BEING from the Well amid the Waste—And Lo!—the phantom Caravan has reached The NOTHING it set out from—Oh, make haste! Like merchants in a huge desert caravan, we need to know where we are going, where we have come from, and in whose company we are traveling.

There is a tale, you really wish to hear it?” “Yes, we want to hear it!” “This I’ve got to hear,” Fez says, downing another shot of green-mist. Æther tells the tale… “It is the late nineteenth century, the last days of the Silk Road in China,” he grabs his staff and stomps it to the ground. “It was a time of great change on Terra, but the old ways still flourished—the ways of the warrior! “Now a merchant’s caravan was making the perilous journey along the Silk Road accompanied by bodyguards, an infamous Chinese boxer and his band of brothers. Stopped in their tracks they did, on seeing from the west a strong wind picking up, a sandstorm brewing. Unseen by the travellers, high in the sky a flying saucer flew overhead—the Yún! In the distance it landed, then no sooner had it started, the sandstorm began to dissipate, as if it had never been. The sand cloud cleared to reveal a lone figure, a Grey. The Ascetic known as Oracle of the Four Winds. The one that never dies, whom for the sake of this account we shall call Lives-a-long-time. “The story goes on to tell how Lives-a-long-time held up a hand for the caravan to stop, upon which the leader dismounted from his camel, and said to the Ascetic, ‘What is it you want demon, you dare to stop Wang-Yin?’ ‘I do!’ said Lives-a-longtime, at which Wang-Yin roared: ‘Then prepare to taste my ironpalm heavy-as-the-world!

The caravan began to travel day and

But when my spirits were at their lowest ebb, the good Samaritan was close at hand, for one morning Susi came running at the top of his speed and gasped out, "An Englishman! I see him!" and off he darted to meet him. The American flag at the head of a caravan told of the nationality of the stranger. Bales of goods, baths of tin, huge kettles, cooking pots, tents, &c, made me think "This must be a luxurious traveller, and not one at his wits' end like me." (28th October, 1871.) It was Henry Moreland Stanley, the travelling correspondent of the New York Herald, sent by James Gordon Bennett, junior, at an expense of more than 4000l., to obtain accurate information about Dr. Livingstone if living, and if dead to bring home my bones. The news he had to tell to one who had been two full years without any tidings from Europe made my whole frame thrill. The terrible fate that had befallen France, the telegraphic cables successfully laid in the Atlantic, the election of General Grant, the death of good Lord Clarendon—my constant friend, the proof that Her Majesty's Government had not forgotten me in voting 1000l. for supplies, and many other points of interest, revived emotions that had lain dormant in Manyuema.

It is always morning, the caravan is always departing. All we can do is share the Prophet's prayer - "O Lord increase our amazement" - and set forth into the Bewilderness.

can make an RV look cluttered very quickly. The key is to be organized, maximize your storage and of course,

And I was traveling by the desert caravan. A convoy of trucks conveying a group of people like me, travelers, immigrants, smugglers, and con men across the Sahara Desert.

I was not only free but also financially solvent, but I did not let that get to my head. Too much had happened in the near past to allow myself such a luxury. Indeed, recent experiences had made me extremely cautious and lot more intentional. The fact that I had some money on me did not get to my head. If anything, it humbled me and instilled a sense of community and "give back" that I did not have prior. Several people had been there for me along the journey, and I felt obligated to do likewise. I paid the transport fares for some young men who were traveling back to Tamanrasset. I also bought food for a group of stranded boys. I figured if we hustlers did not look out for each other, no one would. Besides, at some level, we were all looking for the same thing.

I love wide stretches of open land, but to the average Spaniard, who typically thrives in company and is most at home in a crowd, these fields of Extremadura (which literally means “extremely tough”) could even be intimidating, only partly because not far back in time there were bandits in the region. They were named as the ‘extreme’ end of the country. If it is at least not totally empty, there is certainly a sense of that great lonesome feeling created by the far-off, long, long line at which the earth's surface and the sky meet: a pleasant melancholy of an imagined solitary truck crawling across a plain, the ancestral memory of a caravan trail or a child’s drawing of a single emblematic tree on a small hill.

Wealth and power have never been long permanent in any place…. [T]hey travel over the face of the earth, something like a caravan of merchants. On their arrival everything is found green and fresh; while they remain, all is bustle and abundance, and, when gone, all is left trampled down, barren, and bare. William Playfair1

I am the protector of the unprotected and the caravan-leader for travelers. I have become the boat, the causeway, and the bridge for those who long to reach the further shore. May I be a light for those in need of light. May I be a bed for those in need of rest. May I be a servant for those in need of service, for all embodied beings.

The boy went to the well every day to meet with Fatima. He told her about his life as a shepherd, about the king, and about the crystal shop. They became friends, and except for the fifteen minutes he spent with her, each day seemed that it would never pass. When he had been at the oasis for almost a month, the leader of the caravan called a meeting of all of the people traveling with him.

got off the barges. They rode their caravan the rest of the four hundred miles up to Haran. This cut their travel time in half, to about ten days. Terah needed to get back to Babylon in time for the Akitu Festival. Harran was a small city of only about ten thousand people, noted by trade merchants for its tapestries and carpet weaving. Because of its location, it had a significant population of settled Amorites, a nomadic people from the northwestern hill country of Amurru. The Amorites engaged in animal husbandry, selling their herds across the land. As they became more settled, they also became efficient in agricultural produce. They were an adaptive culture that worshipped Martu, the storm god, another name for Marduk. They had established trade routes from Haran all the way into the Jordan Valley of Canaan.

Not only do westerners travel to some hot country within a given distance to the equator, we rarely even show the locals any respect with regards to their customs and cultures, not to mention speak to them. And usually we travel in groups, without feeling any shame. Then again, when hordes of Japanese tourists, Germans with caravans or Eritrean asylum seekers arrive n an area near our homes, we look at them hatefully and tend to freeze them out.

Old Babylonian Period. Thanks substantially to the royal archives from the town of Mari, the eighteenth century BC has become thoroughly documented. As the century opened there was an uneasy balance of power among four cities: Larsa ruled by Rim-Sin, Mari ruled by Yahdun-Lim (and later, Zimri-Lim), Assur ruled by Shamshi-Adad I, and Babylon ruled by Hammurapi. Through a generation of political intrigue and diplomatic strategy, Hammurapi eventually emerged to establish the prominence of the first dynasty of Babylon. The Old Babylonian period covered the time from the fall of the Ur III dynasty (c. 2000 BC) to the fall of the first dynasty of Babylon (just after 1600 BC). This is the period during which most of the narratives in Ge 12–50 occur. The rulers of the first dynasty of Babylon were Amorites. The Amorites had been coming into Mesopotamia as early as the Ur III period, at first being fought as enemies, then gradually taking their place within the society of the Near East. With the accession of Hammurapi to the throne, they reached the height of success. Despite his impressive military accomplishments, Hammurapi is most widely known today for his collection of laws. The first dynasty of Babylon extends for more than a century beyond the time of Hammurapi, though decline began soon after his death and continued unabated, culminating in the Hittite sack of Babylon in 1595 BC. This was nothing more than an incursion on the part of the Hittites, but it dealt the final blow to the Amorite dynasty, opening the doors of power for another group, the Kassites. Eras of Mesopotamian History (Round Dates) Early Dynastic Period 2900–2350 BC Dynasty of Akkad 2350–2200 BC Ur III Empire 2100–2000 BC Old Babylonian Period 2000–1600 BC Go to Chart Index Eras of Egyptian History (Round Dates) Old Kingdom 3100–2200 BC First Intermediate Period 2200–2050 BC Middle Kingdom 2050–1720 BC Second Intermediate Period 1720–1550 BC Hyksos 1650–1550 BC Go to Chart Index Palestine: Middle Bronze Age Abraham entered the Palestine region during the Middle Bronze Age (2200–1550 BC), which was dominated by scattered city-states, much as Mesopotamia had been, though Palestine was not as densely populated or as extensively urbanized as Mesopotamia. The period began about the time of the fall of the dynasty of Akkad in Mesopotamia (c. 2200 BC) and extended until about 1500 BC (plus or minus 50 years, depending on the theories followed). In Syria there were power centers at Yamhad, Qatna, Alalakh and Mari, and the coastal centers of Ugarit and Byblos seemed to be already thriving. In Palestine only Hazor is mentioned in prominence. Contemporary records from Palestine are scarce, though the Egyptian Story of Sinuhe has Middle Bronze Age Palestine as a backdrop and therefore offers general information. Lists of cities in Palestine are also given in the Egyptian texts. Most are otherwise unknown, though Jerusalem and Shechem are mentioned. As the period progresses there is more and more contact with Egypt and extensive caravan travel between Egypt and Palestine.