The Arabs regard the camel as a present from Heaven, a sacred animal, without whose aid they could neither subsist, trade, nor travel. The milk of these beasts is their common nourishment: they likewise eat their flesh, especially that of the young ones, which they reckon very good. The hair of these animals, which is fine and soft, and is renewed every year, serves them to make stuffs for their clothing and their furniture. Blest with their camels, they not only want for nothing, but they even fear nothing. In a single day they can traverse a tract of fifty leagues into the desert, and thus escape from their enemies. All the armies in the world would perish in pursuit of a troop of Arabs; and hence they are no further submissive than they please. Let any one figure to himself a country without verdure and without water; a burning sun, a sky always clear, plains covered with sand, and mountains still more parched, over which the eye extends and the sight is lost, without being stopped by a single living object; a dead earth constantly whirled about by the winds, presenting nothing but bones, flints scattered here and there, rocks perpendicular, or overthrown; a desert entirely naked, where the traveller never drew his breath under a friendly shade, where nothing accompanies him, and where nothing reminds him of an animated nature; an absolute solitude, a thousand times more frightful than that of the deepest forests; for trees appear as beings to the man, who thus desolate, thus naked, and thus lost, in an unbounded void, looks over all the extended space as his tomb: the light of the day, more dismal than the shade of the night, serves but to renew the idea of his own wretchedness and impotencies, and to present before his eyes the horror of his situation, by extending round him the immense abyss which separates him from the habitable parts of the earth; an immensity which he, in vain, attempts to overrun; for hunger, thirst, and burning heat, haunt every weary moment that remains between despair and death.
Nevertheless, the Arab has found means, by the aid of the camel, to surmount these difficulties, and even to appropriate to himself these frightful gaps of Nature: they serve him for an asylum, they secure his repose, and maintain his independence.—But why does not man know how to make use of any thing without abuse? This same free, independent, tranquil, and even rich Arab, instead of respecting these deserts as the ramparts of his liberty, sullies them with his guilt; he traverses them to rob the neighbouring nations of their slaves and gold; he makes use of them to exercise his robberies, which, unfortunately he enjoys more than his liberty; for his enterprizes are almost always successful. Notwithstanding the caution of his neighbours, and the superiority of their forces, he escapes their pursuit, and carries away with impunity all that he has plundered them of.
An Arab, who destines himself to this business of land piracy, early hardens himself to the fatigue of travelling; he accustoms himself to the want of sleep, to suffer hunger, thirst, and heat. For the same purpose he instructs his camels, he brings them up, and exercises them in the same method. A few days after their birth, he bends their legs under their bellies, forces them to remain on the earth, and in this situation loads them with a heavy weight, and which he only relieves them from to put on greater. Instead of suffering them to feed at pleasure, and to drink when they are thirsty, he regulates their repasts, and by degrees increases them to greater distances between each meal, diminishing also, at the same time, the quantity of their food. When they are tolerably strong, he exercises them in the course; he excites their emulation by the example of horses, and by degrees renders them as swift, and more robust. At length, when he is assured of the strength and swiftness of his camels, and that they can endure hunger and thirst, he then loads them with whatever is necessary for his and their subsistence, departs with them, arrives unexpected at the borders of the desert, stops the first passenger he sees, pillages the straggling habitations, loads his camels with his booty, and if he is pursued, if he is obliged to expedite his retreat, it is then that he displays all his own, and his animal’s talents. Mounted on one of his swiftest camels, he conducts the troop, makes them travel day and night, almost without stopping either to eat or drink; and in this manner, he easily passes over the space of three hundred leagues in eight days; and during all that time of fatigue and travel, he never unloads his camels, and only allows them an hour of repose, and a ball of paste each day. They often run in this manner for nine or ten days without meeting with any water, and when, by chance, there is a pool at some distance, they smell the water at more than half a league before they come to it. Thirst makes them redouble their pace, and then they drink enough for all the time past, and for as long to come; for they often travel many weeks, and their abstinence endures as long as they are upon their journey.
In Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Arabia, Barbary, &c. all their merchandize is carried by camels, which of all conveyances is the most ready and cheapest. Merchants and other travellers assemble themselves in caravans to avoid the insults and robberies of the Arabs. These caravans are often very numerous, and always composed of more camels than men. Each camel is loaded according to his strength,[A] and of this they are themselves so conscious that when overloaded they refuse to proceed, but remain in their resting posture till their burthen be lighted.
[A] The Orientalists call the camel the ship of the desert, alluding to the heavy loads which it carries.
Large camels generally carry 1000, or even 1200lbs. weight, and the smaller 6 or 700. In these commercial journeys, they do not travel quick, and as the route is often seven or eight hundred leagues, they regulate their motions and journeys; they only walk, and go every day ten or twelve leagues; they are unloaded every evening, and are suffered to feed at liberty. In a country where there is plenty of pasture, they eat enough in one hour to ruminate the whole night, and to serve them twenty-four; but they seldom meet with such pastures, and this delicate food is not necessary for them. They even seem to prefer worm-wood, thistles, nettles, furze, and other thorny vegetables to the softest herbs; and as long as they can find plants to brouze on, they easily dispense with drink.
But, this facility, with which they abstain so long from drink, is not pure habit, but rather an effect of their formation. Independently of the four stomachs, which are common to ruminating animals, the camel is possessed of a fifth bag, which serves him as a reservoir to retain the water. This fifth stomach is peculiar to the camel; it is so large as to contain a great quantity of water, where it remains without corrupting, or the other aliments being able to mix with it. When the animal is pressed with thirst, or has occasion to macerate his dry food for ruminating, he causes a part of this water to re-ascend into the paunch, and even into the œsophagus, by a simple contraction of the muscles. It is, therefore, by virtue of this very singular conformation, that the camel can remain several days without drink, and that he can take at one time a prodigious quantity of water, which continues pure and limpid in this reservoir, because neither the liquors of the body, nor the juices of digestion are able to mix with it.
If we compare the deformities, or rather the non-conformities of the camel with other quadrupeds, we cannot doubt but his nature has been considerably altered by constraint, slavery, and continual labour. The camel is the most completely, the most laboriously, and the most anciently enslaved of all domestic animals; the most anciently, because he inhabits climates where man was the most early civilised; the most completely, because in the other species of domestic animals, such as the horse, the dog, the ox, the sheep, the hog, &c. we find some individuals in their natural state, which have not yet been subjected by man; but the whole species of the camel is enslaved, and not any of them are to be found in their primitive state of independence and liberty; and lastly, he is the most laborious slave, because he has never been trained, either for shew, as are many horses, or for amusement, as are almost all dogs, or for the use of the table, as are the ox, the hog, the sheep, &c. He is the only beast of burden whom man has not harnessed, or taught to draw, but whose body is looked upon as a living carriage, which may be loaded and oppressed, even during his time of rest; and when in haste sleeps under the pressure of a heavy burden, his legs bent under him, and the weight of his body resting upon his stomach. This animal always bears the marks of slavery and pain. Below the breast, upon the sternum, there is a large callosity, as tough as horn, and similar ones upon the joints of his legs; although these callosities are to be met with on every camel, yet they themselves prove that they are not natural, but produced by excessive constraint and pain, from being often found filled with pus. The breast and legs, therefore, are deformed by these callosities: the back is also disfigured with a double or single hunch, and both these hunches and callosities are perpetuated from one generation to another. As it is evident, that the first deformity proceeds from the custom of forcing them when quite young to lay on their stomachs, with their legs bent under them, and in that cramped posture, to bear not only the weight of their bodies, but also the burthens which are put upon them; it must be presumed, that the hunch or hunches, owe their origin to the unequal compression of heavy burthens, which may have raised the flesh, and puffed up the fat and skin; for these hunches are not bony, but composed of a fleshy substance, partly of the same consistence as the udder of a cow. Thus the callosities and the hunches should be equally regarded as deformities produced by the continuance of labour, and constraint of body; and though at first accidental and individual, they are now become general and permanent in the whole species. It may also be presumed, that the bag which contains the water, and which is only an appendix to the paunch, has been produced by a forced extension of this viscera. The animal after enduring thirst for a long time by taking at one time as much, and, perhaps more water than the stomach could contain, this membrane would become extended and dilated, as has been observed in the stomach of sheep, which extends and acquires a capacity in proportion to the quantity of its aliment. The stomach is very small in sheep that are fed with grain, while it becomes very large in those that are fed with herbage.
These conjectures would be fully confirmed, or destroyed, if any of these animals could be found wild to compare with the domestic; but these animals do not exist any where in a natural state, or if they do, no one has yet remarked or described them; we must, therefore, suppose, that all which is good and fair about them they owe to Nature, and that all that is defective and deformed is occasioned by the labour and slavery imposed on them by the empire of man. These poor animals must suffer a great deal, as they make lamentable cries, especially when overloaded; but, notwithstanding they are continually oppressed, they have as much spirit as docility. At the first sign they bend their legs, and kneel upon the ground, to be loaded, thus saving the trouble of lifting up the burden to any great height. As soon as they are loaded they raise themselves up again without any assistance, and the conductor, mounted on one of them, precedes the whole troop who follow in the same pace as he leads. They want neither whip nor spur, but when they begin to be fatigued their conductors support their spirit, or rather charm their weariness, by a song, or the sound of some instrument. When they want to prolong the day’s journey they give the animals but one hour’s rest, after which, renewing their song, they proceed on their way for several hours more, and the singing continues until they come to another resting place; then the camels again kneel down, and are eased of their loads, by the cords being untied, and the bales rolling down on each side. In this cramped posture, with their bellies couched upon the earth, they sleep in the midst of their baggage, which is tied on again the next morning with as much readiness and facility as it was untied before they went to rest.
The callosities and tumours on their breast and legs, the bruises and wounds of the skin, the entire shedding their hair, the hunger, thirst, and leanness of these animals are not their only inconveniences; they are prepared for all these evils by one still greater, namely, castration. They leave but one male for eight or ten females, and all the camels of burden are commonly geldings; they are weaker without doubt than those which are not mutilated, but they are more tractable, and ready for employ at all times; while the others are not only ungovernable but even furious, in the rutting time, which remains forty days, and returns every spring; when, it is affirmed, they continually foam, and one or two red vesicles, as large as a hog’s bladder, issue from their mouths. At this time they eat very little, attack and bite animals, and even their masters, to whom at other times they are very submissive.