CHAPTER XXVII
WILD CAMELS
IT was during these aquatic rides in search of the nesting-places of the flamingo that we first fell in with wild camels.
Vague yarns, more or less circumstantial, that such animals wandered over the farther marismas, we remember as early as 1872. The thing, however, had appeared too incredible for consideration—at any rate, we gave it none. But in that spring of 1883 we one day found ourselves face to face with two unmistakable camels. They stood gazing intently about half a mile away—a huge, shaggy, hump-backed beast, accompanied by a second not half its size. The pair wheeled and made off ere we had approached within 400 yards, and something “game-like” in their style prompted our first and last attempt at pursuit. The camels simply ran away from us, splashing through slippery mud and water, two feet deep, at double our horses’ speed, and raising in their flight a tearing trail of foam as of twin torpedo-boats.
Since then we have fallen in with camels on very many occasions, singly, in twos and threes, or in herds of a dozen to twenty and upwards, old and young together. It is, in fact, only necessary to ride far enough into the marisma to make sure of seeing some of these extraordinary monsters startling the desolate horizon, and silhouetted in incongruous juxtaposition with ranks of rosy flamingoes and flotillas of swimming waterfowl.
The whole story of these wild camels and their origin has been narrated in Wild Spain. Briefly summarised, the animals were introduced to Spain in 1829 by the Marquis de Villafranca (House of Medina-Sidonia) with the object of employing them in transport and agriculture, as they are so commonly used on the opposite shores of Africa. But local difficulties ensued—chiefly arising from the intense fear and repugnance of horses towards camels, which resulted in numerous accidents—and eventually the bactrians were set free in the marisma, wherein they have since lived at large and bred under wholly wild conditions for well-nigh a century.
We admit that a statement of the existence of wild camels in these watery wildernesses of Spain—flooded during great part of the year—is difficult to accept. The camel is inseparably associated with the most arid deserts of earth, with sun-scorched Sahara, Arabia Petraea, and waterless tropical regions. Its physical economy is expressly adapted for such habitats—the huge padded feet and seven-chambered stomach that will sustain it for days without drinking. Yet the reader was asked to believe that this specialised desert-dweller had calmly accepted a condition of life diametrically reversed, and not only lives, but breeds and flourishes amidst knee-deep swamp.
At the period of which we write the camel was not known to exist on earth in a wild state, and physical disabilities were alleged which would have precluded such a possibility. During historic times it had never been described save only as a beast of burden, the slave of man—and a savage, intractable slave at that. A little later, however, the Russian explorer, Préjevalsky, met with wild camels roaming over the Kumtagh deserts of Turkestan, and in Tibet Sven Hedin has since shown the two-humped camel to be one of the normal wild beasts of the Central Asian table-lands.
Wild camels in Europe represented a considerable draft upon the credulity of readers; and a chorus of ridicule was poured upon the statement. Men who had “lived in Spain for years”—a foreign consul at Seville, engineers employed in reclaiming marismas (somewhere else)—all rushed into print to attest the absurdity of the idea. Limited experience was mistaken for complete knowledge! Similar treatment was accorded to our observation of pelicans in Denmark. Ornithologists of Copenhagen insinuated we did not know pelicans from seagulls; yet the Danish pelicans are as well known to the Jutlander fisher-folk as are the Spanish camels to the herdsmen and fowlers of the marisma. Knowledge is no monopoly of high places.