To reach it was a job, entailing a great fuss of camels, dromedaries, tents, and escorts- all the expensive paraphernalia of desert expeditions…Yet they all found many pleasures on the way…
-The Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay
Macaulay was writing about Europeans visiting Palmyra on the Strata Diocletiana, a Roman Road from Damascus running due east to the Euphrates, and yes it was an expensive, and dangerous, undertaking in the early days. Brigands, kidnappers, and bedouin extortionists were everywhere in the desert.
Lucky for us on the Darb al-’Arba’īn, we were the only ones of our sort whom passing tribesmen had ever seen, so the words that they exclaimed- Ya Salām, MāShā’Allah, Al-Khawāja huwa Majnūn…Ô Peace, What God has Willed, The Foreigner is Nuts- when KhairAllah explained who we were made us feel that we were among his friends.