acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

:
428 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
Caramoot in the Araanus mountains.
Without a stay
of* several months' duration each year at these cool
resorts, the gentlemen professed themselves unable
to keep in health sufficiently to do the Worshipful
Company's business. When duties w^ere light and
opportunity offered, distant excursions were made
in this wa}'' some of the Company's officials discovered
or rediscovered the ruins of Tadmor, which is
Palmyra, nearly two hundred miles distant on the
edge of the Syrian desert. There are glimpses, too,
in the old books, of hospitality at the Factor}^—more
often ofi those occasions, not altogether rare—when
British travellers came from India ind the Persian
Gulf For as long ago as the middle of the eighteenth
century this appears to have been a recognised route
to and from India.
" Mr Munro of Calcairn and his party of gentlemen
riding from India arrived this day "
; so the
Chronicle reads, and one would like to hear more
about this overland journey of April and May in the
long ago year 1748 ;
but little more is given except
that the gentlemen of Aleppo were much refreshed
by the visit of Mr Munro and his party.
There is mention, also, of the Company's regular
postal service carried on by its own servants between
Aleppo and Bagdad, and thence by service of the East
India Company to India. One gathers on the whole
that the Most Worshipful Company had great influence
in the land and could do pretty well what it
chose ; that its policy was enterprising and its affairs
exceedingly well managed, and that profit and prosperity
were no more than its due. And still more
one feels that a sure instinct directed the Company
in its attempt to extend British influence from the
Gulf of Alexandretta to the Persian Gulf and so to
India.
Now and then regrets
are found that the Company
had not fixed its chief factory at Antioch instead of
Aleppo, and the point is made that Alexandretta
was as much the port of Antioch as of Aleppo and