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Formerly travellers for Teheran used to go that way and made the journey upon swift-moving camels in about twenty days. The route to Persia via the steamers on the Black Sea to Batoum, the railway across the Caucasus, and steamers on the Caspian Sea is quicker, shorter, and cheaper, and hence the trade goes that way.

The caravans stop at a khan (as the old-fashioned hotels are called where entertainment is given to both man and beast), just outside of Trebizond, and we went down there to see the camels and their drivers. Two hundred camels had just arrived from Persia after a journey of thirty days, bringing twelve hundred bags of rice. I talked with the boss driver, a gigantic Persian with a broad, cheerful face, who told me that he had never been anywhere but along the same route between Tabriz and Trebizond, and had travelled that regularly two or three times a year for more than twenty years. Caravans often went to Tibet and as far as China, he said, but he had never been that far.