“I should think it would be very easy,” said the mother camel. “It must be as clear as water, if it’s a real diamond, so that you can see what’s written in it without any trouble at all.”
“Well, you see, the diamond takes the rays of the sun on every one of its points,” said the little camel, “and so it practically blinds me, it dazzles so. But I think I can see something about ‘drink’ or ‘water’ written in it. Oh, yes,” he went on presently, during which time his mother concluded he had been studying the jewel. “Oh, yes. Now I can see. I’ve got in the shadow of your tail and I can make out the words quite well. It says—let me see—yes, it says:—
“When you would drink
Just cease to think
And bend your knee at my brink.”
“Wonderful!” exclaimed his mother, joyfully, and he could see by the way she ran youthfully over the sand that she had completely forgotten all her troubles and discomforts. So through the entire blazing hot day, as they crossed the desert, he told her one by one the endless colors and verses of the beads. His little throat grew hoarser and hoarser, and his tongue drier and drier from talking so much, but the excited jerk of her shabby tail before him was enough to urge him on and on. The amethyst was the jewel of memory, he told her, and you only had to hold it for a minute in your ear for all the nice things that had happened in the past to become the present. The moonstone was the bead of the future, and after you had rubbed it hard you could see reflected in it all that was going to happen, and so you could avoid any coming danger. The sapphire was the bead of purity, and when you were old you need only press it for an instant against your forehead to have all your years drop from you like the petals from a flower.
“And the opal,” he ended, as the blue light of evening began to fall. “It is the bead for those who have told a lie. All you have to do is to hold it under your tongue for half an hour and the lie you have told becomes the truth.”
“Ah, there’s the oasis at last!” his mother cried out. The youngest camel lowered his head and peered through her legs, and there on the horizon, which had not altered the entire day, he saw the distant dark points which must be the oasis trees growing. “The time passed very quickly, although I was so impatient to see the necklace every minute,” his mother said. “But now in no time at all we can settle down and undo our packs and then we can try the magic beads. The first one I’m going to try is the sapphire, so I need not be old any longer, and then the amethyst, so that all the nice things that happened to me before will come true again, and your father will be alive with us, and then—”
Strangely enough, the little camel said nothing at all, but simply followed in her footsteps, and once they had reached the green island in the vast white sea of sand, the mother camel turned eagerly to her son.
