“Perhaps it might be better if I tried putting it to music,” he said. But the fact that he did not have his harp with him made the biggest difference, and now when he opened his lips to sing, nothing but a hoarse whisper came from his mouth. By this time, he knew beyond any shadow of doubt that he was neither a poet nor a singer, and he swallowed his pride and said bravely to himself: “Very well, then. Now I have found out the truth about myself. It’s time I did. I cannot write poetry and I cannot sing, but perhaps I can dance.”
He remembered the foolish poem he had made up about dancing for the Shah and the Lamas and the Raj with a tambourine tied to his tail, and now he tried to execute a few dance steps across the burning sand. But he only tottered awkwardly from side to side, and if he hadn’t stopped at once he would certainly have toppled over.
“I am a camel without any gifts of any kind,” he told himself in a stern voice. “Everything I have believed about myself has been blind, empty vanity. I have no talent as a poet, nor as a singer, nor as a dancer, and now that I am much too weak to carry a load and walk in a caravan with other camels, I am no good to anyone on earth and I might as well be dead.”
Indeed this might very easily have been the end of the youngest camel, for there seemed no reason at all why he should not have sunk down there under the blistering heat and quietly breathed his last. And in another day or two Annie and Mabel would have come flapping along and smiled sideways at each other as they wheeled above him, and after circling over him a few times they would have descended and begun their meal. Only this isn’t at all what happened, for now that the little camel admitted that he no longer thought his own voice so beautiful and his own poetry so fine, and no longer longed for a full-length mirror so that he could see how lovely he looked while he danced, he seemed to be able to hear other voices which he had never dreamed existed. The air that passed his ears seemed now to have the power of speech, and as he walked he listened.
“There is an oasis in every camel’s desert of despair,” said one particle of air to him, and another murmured:—
“It cannot be far now, for you have come a long way.”
“Keep a stiff upper hump,” said the soft warm air in his ears. “Be armed with patience, lamblike, quiet as a mouse, cool as a cucumber.”
“I’ll try,” said the youngest camel meekly, although he was feeling very hot.
Even the sand under his feet seemed to be endowed with speech now, for as it ran through his hoofs he heard it whispering:—
“The wind is coming, the wind is coming.”