The Desert World

by Arthur Mangin

“Gold and silk,” says Buffon, “are not the true wealth of Asia. The camel is the treasure of the East.” It is a fact that this animal is wonderfully adapted to supply the wants of the desert races. It may be said to supply them with every object of primary necessity; food, clothing, and even habitation, fire, and the means of transport.

The flesh of the young camel, though inferior to beef or mutton, is savoury and easy of digestion; the she-camel yields an abundance of milk as substantial and agreeable to the taste as that of the cow. The camel’s skin is, it is true, a coarse wool, but long, tenacious, and readily wrought. The Mongols make it into tissues and cord. Out of the tissues they weave their clothing, coverings, and tents; with the cord, which is of various thicknesses, they fabricate the harness of their horses and other objects of equipment. Camel-leather is not inferior in suppleness and solidity to that which we make use of in Europe. The dung of these animals, dried in the sun, serves as fuel not only for cooking food, but even for working metals. Finally, as a beast of burden, the camel surpasses every other in strength, swiftness, endurance of fatigue, and, above all, in that proverbial sobriety which enables him to accomplish a journey of several successive days without taking either food or drink. From nature he has received a special organization, which well justifies his Arab name of “the ship of the desert.” It consists essentially in the structure of his feet, in that of his stomach, and in the species of hunch or hump which he carries on his back.

We know, in the first place, that the camel’s foot does not resemble that of other ruminants; it is bifurcated, but the two toes, very strong and much elongated, are furnished not with a hoof, but with a short nail, adhering only to the final phalange; they are, moreover, palmated; that is to say, reunited near the extremity by a carneous membrane, which is supplied underneath with a veritable thick and horny sole. The foot can thus plant itself on a wide surface, and seems expressly adapted to the shifting sandy soil which the camel usually traverses.

As for the stomach, beside the four compartments into which the stomach of all ruminants is divided, we notice, on the sides of the paunch, a mass of cubic cells, or partitions, always containing a quantity of tolerably pure water, very drinkable, and kept as a kind of reserve supply; so that more than one traveller, when crossing the desert, and perceiving neither fountain, well, nor stream in which to quench his devouring thirst, has preserved his life at the expense of that of his camel, by killing the poor animal, and opening his reservoir to drink its contents.

The hump, of which the Arabian camel, or dromedary, has but one, while the Bactrian, or camel properly so called, has two, is, in truth, “a storehouse of solid nutriment, on which he can draw for supplies long after every digestible part has been extracted from the contents of the stomach: this storehouse consists of one or two large collections of fat stored up in ligamentous cells supported by the spines of the dorsal vertebræ. When the camel is in a region of fertility, the hump becomes plump and expanded; but after a protracted journey in the wilderness it becomes shrivelled and reduced to its ligamentous constituent, in consequence of the absorption of the fat.”[25]

To be deprived of drink for from eight to ten days is no hardship to the camel. Accredited authorities testify that without any serious inconvenience he can go without drink for twenty-three and even twenty-five days. In the way of solid food, a ball of cake weighing from a pound to a pound and a quarter, will suffice him for a whole day. Often when he has set out on his journey fasting, he contents himself with browsing on the way a few green or dry bushes, and in the evening sups on a handful of dried beans. But this singular abstemiousness is not his sole good quality; his vigour, his docility, his swiftness render him equally valuable.

The ordinary burden of a small camel is from 600 to 800 lbs.; a large camel will carry 1000 lbs. or upwards, from thirty to thirty-five miles a-day; but the maharis, or those which are used for speed alone, will travel daily from twenty to thirty leagues.

The camel of the Steppes, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, is, as I have already hinted, the Bactrian or camel strictly so called. This animal differs from his African congener in several very important physical characteristics, and perhaps also in some moral peculiarities. His two humps are smaller than the one hump of the dromedary. He is a little larger than the latter; his average stature is from six feet and a half to seven feet. His hair, of a deep chestnut brown, almost woolly on the humps, the head, and the upper part of the neck, is short and smooth on the body, and hangs in long fringes below the neck and around the fore-legs. He endures without inconvenience the most opposite temperatures, great heat and extreme cold, so that his habitat naturally ranges over an immense extent of country. He is found throughout the zone of the Steppes, even to the confines of Siberia, on the borders of Lake Baïkal; he was formerly still more common in Hindostan, but has now almost disappeared, owing to the great consumption entailed by the military expeditions of our East Indian Government.