Page:Enterprise and Adventure.djvu/138

118 reward the man well for his trouble, and, when they had regained their path, sent him home again. This, however, was but the least of his difficulties. The men hired to guard the baggage absconded under cover of the darkness; wolves attacked their horses and cattle in the night; the country was infested by lawless bands of soldiers, which made it dangerous to travel after dusk; and in the day-time the heats were intolerable. At length they reached Astrabad. The tide of the Shah's fortune had now turned; the rebels were subdued, and Hanway was fortunate enough to obtain from the general, in goods and money, as directed by the Shah, nearly the whole of the original value of his caravan, with which he once more embarked on the Caspian. At Reshd he reinvested the wealth thus recovered in raw silk, which he was enabled to convey safely by way of Astrachan to Moscow, where he received letters informing him that, by the death of a relative in England, he had become the inheritor of a fortune. From Moscow to St. Petersburg, four hundred and eighty-seven English miles, he travelled in three days in an open sledge over the frozen snow, and on the 1st of January, 1745, arrived in that city, from which he had originally set out on his wanderings, after an absence of a year and sixteen weeks, during which time he had travelled more than five thousand four hundred English miles. Although he had gained little by his journey, he brought back valuable information as to the trading capacities of a country then but little known to Europe; and the Russian Government, when the civil war in Persia was ended, were enabled to avail themselves of this information, with great advantage to the