But Indian popular observation lacks the Arab keenness, nor is the beast so important and highly thought of as in Arabia. There is no strong insight in calling the long shafts of the camel's limbs crooked, as in the angry saying to a shifty ne'er-do-well, "O camel, hast thou one straight bone in thy body?" The pride of a big man is rebuked by the saying, "The camel thought he was the biggest thing in the world till he came under the mountain." Of a very tall man who, in India, is often a simpleton, they say, "Tall as a camel, but silly as an ass," and of an unwilling, grumbling servant, "He snarls like a camel when you load him." The bite of a camel is very severe and sometimes poisonous, so the saying goes, "God preserve us from the nip of a camel and the snap of a dog." Of a notoriously unlucky man they say, "Even if he were perched on a camel a dog would jump up and bite him." The Kirgiz have a pious expansion of this saying: "Whom the fates bless with a good son may light a bonfire; but the father cursed with a bad son will be devoured by dogs, though he be mounted on the back of a camel." We express the completeness of ill-luck by saying, "The bread never falls but on its buttered side." The Kirgiz say, "One never falls but from a nár"—the large-sized Bokhariot camel. A common saying similar to our "waiting to see which way the cat jumps" is based on a trivial story. A potter and a greengrocer hired a camel between them. The camel reached round with his long neck and ate some of the cabbages on the greengrocer's side, whereupon the potter jeered. "Wait and see which side he sits down upon," said the greengrocer. The camel sat down on the potter's side and smashed his wares. Æsop's frog tried to swell himself as big as the ox, but in India they say of pretentious little people, "When the camels were branded, the frog also held up his leg," as who should say, "brand me too." "The goat-keeper went to buy a camel and wanted to feel its ears" (a point of handling which no judicious goat-buyer omits) is a saying which has several applications in India; but in Britain also we may see critics a-tiptoe, reaching up with tiny and inapt canons of judgment to things they do not understand.
The decorative value of the camel cannot be appreciated by those who have only seen one or two at a time. He was made for a sequence, as beads are made for stringing. On an Indian horizon a long drove of camels, tied head to tail, adorns the landscape with a festooned frieze of wonderful symmetry and picturesqueness. Five hundred camels go to a mile.[3] If I had a very long and lofty hall to decorate I should pray the architect to let me loop it round with camels, with here and there a Biloch driver, as the frieze turned a corner or was interrupted by a bracket or girder. For a quaint and almost comic spectacle, a bivouac of a camel Kafila or caravan on the march is not easily surpassed. The beasts are seated four or five on each side of a sheet or table-cloth on which their fodder is placed. Camels are as symmetrically constructed as gun-carriages, and their hind-legs fold up like two-foot-rules. They rest in great part on a pedestal behind the chest with which Nature has furnished them, and sit close together in high-elbowed state with an indescribable air of primness and propriety. With, as often happens, a driver supping at each end of this table in the wilderness, the whole arrangement has an absurdly formal and well-regulated air, suggesting a tea-party of elderly maiden ladies, as the long necks curve and bridle and the mincing mouths move busily.
[3] This is the present official estimate, allowing a little over 10 feet 6 inches per camel. Sir Charles Napier, however, writing of his first day's march from Rori to Imaín Ghur in the Sindh desert, allows 15 feet to each animal: "Oh! the baggage! the baggage! it is enough to drive one mad. We have 1500 camels with their confounded long necks, each occupying 15 feet! Fancy these long devils in a defile; four miles and a quarter of them!"
The deliberate movement of the beasts under their burdens is impressive and not without a touch of scornful majesty. Only an Oriental, one would think, could accommodate himself to that unhasting cadence of step. Perhaps the reported existence of wild camels in Arizona territory is a fabulous or jocular illustration of American character. It is said they were imported into the United States to serve as pack animals, but nobody foresaw that the nervous, electric American was the last man alive to pace placidly at the end of a camel's nose-rope. He naturally dropped it in disgust;—and now there are wild camels in Arizona. If this story is not true, it ought to be.
IN A SERAI (REST-HOUSE)
The truth about the camel's character has often been debated. He is wonderful, and, in his own way, beautiful to look at, and his patience, strength, speed, and endurance are beyond all praise. The camel-riders of Rajputana and Central India, mounted on animals of a swift breed, cover almost incredible distances at high speed, finding it necessary to protect themselves against the racking motion by broad leathern belts tightly buckled, which are often covered with velvet and prettily broidered in silk. Even they, who know the beast at his best, never pretend to like their mounts, as one likes a horse. So useful a beast is estimable, but the most indulgent observation fails to find a ground for affection. Europeans, at all events, who have to do with camels seem to think it were as easy to lavish one's love on a luggage van. He is a morose, discontented, grumbling brute, a servant of man, it is true, as is the water that turns a mill-wheel, the fire that boils a kettle, or the steam that stirs the piston of a cylinder. He does not come to a call like other beasts, but has to be fetched and driven from browsing. There are but few words made for his private ear such as belong to horses, dogs, and oxen. An elephant has a separate word of command for sitting down with front legs, with hind legs, or with all together, and he moves at a word. A camel has but one, and that must be underlined with a tug at his nose-rope ere he will stoop. But he has a large share in that great public property of curses whose loss would enrich the world.
RAJPUT CAMEL-RIDER'S BELT
The camel has so little sense, one wonders he is credited with malevolence, but so it is, and there is sound appreciation of his vindictiveness in a phrase in use for bearing malice, equivalent to "camel-tempered," and of his aimless wandering in another addressed to an idle man, "Why are you loafing round like a loose camel?"