Yet Aleppo itself was near enough to the sea to recover even from this disaster; and within 150 years of Timour's conquest it was once more one of the chief marts of the East. Hither came the London Turkey merchants, among them the "Master of the Tiger." Hither, with the Venetians, came Othello, to have his memorable encounter with the "heathen Turk." John Verney was trading here in the middle of the seventeenth century, and describes it as "the most famous city in all the Grand Seignior's dominions for the confluence of merchants of all nations." Among the commodities dealt with he enumerates the "oak galls for dyers" which are still a valuable harvest in the Kurdistan mountains; but he makes no mention of the liquorice, which is now the most important of all.
Aleppo owes its prosperity chiefly to the Arabs; for though, under the name of Berea, it was well known both to the Greeks and Romans, it never appears in their days to have been a particularly important place. No doubt it profited by the decline of Antioch, which had been the second city in the Byzantine Empire. The new direct railway line to Iskanderun harbour will henceforth augment its importance; and when the completion of the Baghdad railway links it up with Constantinople and India it may even attain the position once held by Antioch itself.
Our own business at Aleppo was confined to the hire of a carriage to convey us and our baggage and our fortunes across the desert to Mosul. This was a subject which involved us in some three days' delicate diplomacy; and eventually we closed with a contractor who offered to take us through at the price of nine pounds for a nominal fortnight's journey,[1] with two mejidies (about seven shillings) extra for every day that we chose to call a halt.
The carriage in which we proposed to achieve our _hegira_ consisted of a sort of four-wheeled coster's barrow, endowed with flea-like agility by a perfect cat's-cradle of springs. It had a seat in front for the driver, and a shelf behind on which our baggage could be corded; but there were no seats for the passengers, and accordingly we spread our sleeping bags upon a thick litter of straw. Most of the springs and many of the spokes had been broken and the fractures had been swathed in string. This required great quantities of string. Finally the tarpaulin tilt which enclosed the body of the vehicle (and which was ostensibly designed for shelter) proved useful for fielding the cargo whenever it got skied by the jolts. Such a carriage is known as "an _araba_," or alternatively as an _yaili_--a name which is probably onomatopoeic, for it is about the "slithiest" thing that runs on wheels.[2]