“I confess my ideas are very vague. I couldn’t tell you to a ton.”
They both laughed.
“I think it’s the natural history books that are given as Sunday school prizes that are responsible for the average Englishman’s ideas about camels. Their proper load for regular work is 300 lbs. Of course they can take more for a short time. The natives overload them badly themselves, but they won’t let us when we hire them. You bet they watch that. And he’s got to be watered every second day to keep his condition—not about once a week as people imagine. As his pace is two-and-a-half miles an hour, a horse can really get just as far between drinks. All the same he’s a most invaluable beast. We could do nothing without him on the desert. Oh, you’ll get to like them all right when you’re used to them.”
As a matter of fact, now that the time was getting so near, I began to have qualms of uneasiness at the idea of riding on one of these uncouth beasts.
I like riding my own familiar cob, but am somewhat nervous of mounting even a strange horse, and to me a camel had never been anything but an object placed for my amusement and instruction in the Zoological Garden. There he had always amused and instructed me from the other side of a tall and impregnable iron fence.
I knew of course that trippers in Egypt always got photographed mounted on a camel with the Sphinx and a Pyramid in the background, as if all their tripping in Egypt were done on camel-back, and they had not in fact gone from Cairo to Ghizeh in an electric tramcar. But I now reflected that these were doubtless special camels kept for the purpose, broken, as it were, to trippers—heart-broken no doubt!
But to have to mount and control the ordinary camel of Arab commerce, picked up by Jakoub on a wild and inaccessible part of the desert, I felt, might be a very different proposition, and one making a heavy demand on the courage of a middle-aged and naturally timid vicar.
“I hope,” I said, “I shall be able to ride the beast all right.”
“Oh! you’ll manage that easily,” Edmund said. “They’re perfectly quiet. We’ll show you how to mount, and after he gets up, you have only to sit there and oscillate.”
It sounded quite simple, and yet there were vague misgivings left in my heart.