Among travelers, moreover, Muslims were preeminent. In fact the caravan trails and sea lanes of the fourteenth century hummed with travelers on long-distance errands of all sorts. But six and a half centuries ago, when the world's population was many times less than it is now, cities were much smaller and more widely scattered, vast deserts and oceans separated settled communities, and the pace of travel was limited to the speed of horses or sailing ships, we might suppose that few people ever ventured far beyond their natal land. In the age of the global village we might not be terribly surprised to bump into some old acquaintance while changing planes in Tokyo or Frankfurt. About five and a half years later when he was traveling in the northern Sahara Desert at the opposite extremity of the hemisphere, he became the house guest of al- Bushri's brother! In southern China he met a man named al-Bushri whom he had known slightly in India and who came originally from a town in Morocco only forty miles from Tangier. When he tried to make a visit in cognito to the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, travelers who had known him in northern India 1,600 miles away recognized him and blew his cover. Wandering lost in the remote forests of northern Turkey, he met up with "an acquaintance," who saved him and his traveling companions from perishing in a snowstorm. Indeed, one of the more fascinating aspects of Ibn Battuta's travels through the equivalent of nearly fifty modern countries is that he was repeatedly running into people he knew.
Within, a few days he was meeting all sorts of people on the road, and as he traveled back and forth across the Eastern Hemisphere during the ensuing twenty-nine years, he made hundreds of friends, married numerous women, fathered several children, and counted among his associates eminent scholars, royal officials, rich merchants, and Mongol kings. "I set out alone, having neither fellow- traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer nor caravan whose party I might join." His departure may have been poignant, but his loneliness did not last long. "I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones," he tells us in his celebrated Rihla, or Book of Travels. the young legal scholar Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta set out from his native city of Tangier on the north coast of Morocco to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca.
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