“If a camel falls ill or is overcome with old age while crossing the desert, the men unsaddle and unload him and divide his pack among the others, and then he is abandoned. They leave him alone there to die, kicking hour after hour against death, while his friends are forced on, screaming aloud with terror and despair and trying to look back over their shoulders at him as they go.”
“If the truth is so terrible as all that,” he had said to his mother, “I don’t see why anyone pays any attention to it. I think it would be much better to make up something else instead.”
And another night his mother had said to him—
“If a camel does not have the smell of his own kind about him, he is horribly frightened. But this is such a foolish thing, if you really stop and think about it, that wise camels have taught themselves to master their fear.” And another time his mother had said: “If we camels have silence in our ears, that is another thing that drives us out of our minds with fright. Perhaps that is the reason they hang bells around our necks or perhaps that is why you like to sing so loud at night when everything is still.”
Remembering her words, the little camel began to sing in a high quavering voice. He was in such a state of nerves that he didn’t know what words he sang, and the tune kept changing from one thing to another, and he couldn’t manage to keep on the right key. But still he went on singing and singing, making up songs about nothing lasting forever, and about the swiftness of time passing.
“All the time I am singing [was what he sang],
Time is passing, passing, passing.
The ordeal of loneliness will be over before I know it.
The camel drivers will come back and fetch me
And I’ll run as fast as I can to Aqsu and find my mother—”