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A very little sufficed the poor; the rich were housed in palaces and panoplied in gems. As time went on, the processional of traders became a processional led out, in turn, by the merchants of one city after another. It is a picturesque study, that of the trade-routes of the Middle Ages!
But Mongolia seemed to afford a way out of my doubts. Post-roads and trade-routes crossed the country from the Great Wall, sooner or later striking the Siberian railway near Lake Baikal.
By naval positions we mean, firstly, naval bases and, secondly, the terminals of the greater lines of communication or trade-routes and the focal areas where they tend to converge, as at Finisterre, Gibraltar, Suez, the Cape, Singapore, and many others.
With the exception that donkeys and asses were employed for beasts of burden and were not supplemented by horses and camels until a much later period, a camping-ground in the desert on one of the great trade-routes must have presented a scene similar to that of a caravan camping in the desert at the present day.
Color and laughter lie mostly along the trade-routes, where the peoples of the world come and go in curiosity and rivalry. This ashen crowd swarming gloomily through the dark tunnels represents the real Moghreb that is close to the wild tribes of the "hinterland" and the grim feudal fortresses of the Atlas. How close, one has only to go out to Sefrou on a market-day to see.
"He has gone north, you say?" "Yes. Somewhere in Central Asia you will find him," and as Linforth looked up startled, Ralston continued calmly, "Yes, it's a large order, I know, but it's not quite so large as it looks. The trade-routes, the only possible roads, are not so very many. No man can keep his comings and goings secret for very long in that country.
At an early date the great pass was constructed through the Mei-hung range of mountains, and this proves to be one of the principal trade-routes in use at the present time. Another thousand years and we have the city of to-day, with its peculiar conditions, its fascinations. Surely its age commands our respect. Its people, seemingly impassive, are a subject for study, as are all the Chinese.
I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow-roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibres of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade-routes, building boats, and founding navigation ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.
Of the one policy which has constantly prevailed with our great English admirals, that of making the destruction of the enemy's fighting fleet the primary object, with mere commerce-destroying secondary, Drake was in practice the father; of the other, that of concentrating on his trade-routes and menacing his commerce, not unusually favoured by France in her wars with England, John Hawkins was the advocate.
The Levant was suffering from changes which interrupted its commerce and which made the old trade-routes that passed through it almost impracticable. The principal cause for this process of decay and failure was the rise of the Ottoman Turks as a conquering power.
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