caravanserai

karavanserai A roadside inn having a central courtyard where caravans can rest.
1859, w:Omar Khayyam|Omar Khayyám, w:Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam|The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám translated by w:Edward FitzGerald (poet)|Edward FitzGerald, XVI, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35260/35260-h/35260-h.htmTHE_FIRST_EDITION_OF_THE_TRANSLATION

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai / Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day, / How Sultán after Sultán with his Pomp / Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.

When we got to Cromley, it was too early to go to the spike, and we walked several miles farther, to a plantation beside a meadow, where one could sit down. It was a regular caravanserai of tramps—one could tell it by the worn grass and the sodden newspaper and rusty cans that they had left behind.

Eight days later, after leaving the desert and riding through neatly tended villages and snow-capped mountain scenery, he arrived there, hiring himself a room in a caravanserai near the bazaar.

By the bye it is as well to mention, for the benefit of the inexperienced, that there are no Inns in Ireland; all are hotels, from the lowest road cabin to the splendid caravanserai, with all its appurtenances of luxury and ease.

Six anxious inquiries of marble-fronted-hotel clerks about rates; and twice when she angrily made it plain she couldn't afford it, and quit the caravanserai where Andy and Mahala and Mrs. Boyle were to loll in kitchenette-bedizened splendour and hunted up a smaller hotel that looked like a private house with obesity.