Surely a camel in trouble—and, among other things, the beast's roar told Ali that it was in trouble—was the finest of reasons for ignoring everything else. Not lightly had the camel been designated as Allah's greatest gift to mankind. To slight His gift would be to slight Him. His conscience clear on that point, Ali devoted himself to analyzing the various things he'd learned about when a camel roared in the distance.
The earliest recollection of Ali, who'd never known father or mother, was of his career as a rug vendor's apprentice in the bazaar of The Street Called Straight. His master worked him for as many hours as the boy could stay awake, beat him often and left him hungry when he was unable to steal food. But the life was not without compensations.
Though no longer enjoying the flourishing trade it had once known, Damascus sat squarely astride the main route between the vast reaches of Mohammedan Turkey and Mecca, the city that every good Moslem must visit at least once during his lifetime. The Turks came endlessly, and in numbers, and since it's only sensible to do a little trading, even when on a holy pilgrimage, when they reached Damascus, they stopped to trade at The Street Called Straight. But though the pilgrims were interesting, Ali found the camels that carried both the Turks and their goods infinitely more so.
He knew them all—plodding baggage beasts, two-humped bactrians, the hybrid offspring of bactrians and one-humped camels, and all the species and shades of species in between. But though he liked all camels, he saved his love for the dromedary, the heira, the hygin, riding camel, or, as Ali called them, the dalul.
Invariably ridden by proud men and never used for any purpose other than riding, they were a breed apart. Slighter and far more aristocratic than the baggage beasts, they could carry a rider one hundred miles between sunrise and sunset, satisfy themselves with a few handfuls of dates when the ride ended, and go without water for five days. Their pedigrees, in many instances longer than those of their riders, dated back to pre-Biblical history. The owner of a dalul considered such a possession only slightly less precious than his life.
It was when he became acquainted with the dalul that Ali invented his own mythical father. This parent was not a nameless vagabond, petty thief, or fly-by-night adventurer who never even knew he'd sired a son and wouldn't have cared if he had, but a renowned trainer of dalul. It was he who went to the camel pastures and chose the wild young stallions that were ready for breaking. Though they would kill any ordinary man who ventured near, Ali's father gentled them and taught them to accept the saddle and rein. Ali determined that he himself must go out with the camels and promptly ran away from his master.
Because he was too young to be of any imaginable use, the few caravan masters who condescended to look at him usually aimed a blow right after the look. For two years Ali was one of the numerous boy-vagabonds who infested the bazaars of Damascus. If such a life did not elevate the mind it could not help but sharpen the wits.
Then, just after his ninth birthday, Ali got his chance to go out with a caravan. It was a very small and very poor one, fewer than fifty camels, and the caravan master decided to take Ali only because he was a boy. As such, quite apart from the fact that he could safely be browbeaten, it was reasonable to assume that he had not had time to learn all the tricks of experienced drivers, the more talented among whom have been known to get rich, and leave the owners poor, on just one journey.
Apart from their uses and physical functions, which he learned so precisely that one glance enabled him to cite any camel's past history, age, present state of health, and what it would probably do next, Ali came to appreciate the true miracle of a camel. He was the one in ten thousand, the camel driver who knew everything the rest did—and much they did not—and who transcended that to understand clearly the nature of the camel itself. So fine was his touch and so complete the affinity between camels and himself, that even beasts thought hopelessly unmanageable responded to him.
Nine years old when he made his first trip, Ali had spent the past nine years on the caravan routes. He'd been to Baghdad, Istanbul, Tosya, Trebizond. He went where the camels went and never cared if it was two hundred miles or two thousand. But though every member of a caravan is entitled to trade for himself, and many a camel driver has become a caravan master or owner, Ali was as poor as on the day he started.