The barren desert, fear of the Bedouin, always ready to rob and waylay the caravan, and the hatred of the Moslem for the Christian have closed the country for many years against travellers and missionaries; but, although so long neglected, Arabia is now becoming better known. The coasts have been explored, and they are actually building a railway to-day across the desert from Damascus to Mecca and another railway along the northern borders to Bagdad. A few months ago a British traveller crossed Arabia in a motor car. How the camels must have been surprised!
In the chapters that follow, we will take some zigzag journeys together,—sometimes on camels, sometimes on donkey-back, or in the Arab sailing-boats along the coast. We will not tell you what others have seen or heard in this wonderful country of the camel, but tell our own story; and we hope that you will learn to love the Arab, his country, and his camel as much as we do, and make many a new zigzag track across the map of Arabia to mark your journeys as future missionaries.
II
THE CAMEL AT HOME
Mr. and Mrs. Camel
At Home All Over Arabia.
B. C. 4000 — A. D. 1911.
Persia for goats, Egypt for crocodiles, Cashmere for sheep, Thibet for bulldogs, India for tigers, but Arabia for the camel! To see real live dromedaries, you must come to Arabia. For although the camel is often met with elsewhere, no country can show him in all his beauty like that country which is called by the Arabs themselves “Um-el-Ibl,” mother of the camel. The Oman dromedary is the prince of all camel breeds, and is so highly esteemed in the markets of the East as to fetch three times the price of any other camel. And no wonder that this animal has reached perfection in Arabia! He has been at home in its deserts and trained by its tribes for many, many centuries. Arabia and the camel are so closely connected that one can neither understand the Arab nor his language without him. Without the camel, life in a large part of Arabia would at present be impossible. Without the camel, the Arabic language itself would lose a vast number of words and ideas and possibly also a great many of its difficult sounds. There is not a page in the Arabic dictionary which does not have some reference to the camel and the life of this wonderful ship of the desert. The Arabs give him five thousand, seven hundred and forty-four different names, but the most common name by which he is known, not only by the Arabs but in all languages, is that of “Jemil,” that is to say, “camel.”
When the Ishmaelites brought Joseph to Egypt, and when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon, they travelled on camels. The caravan was the earliest trunk line across the great lands of the East, and has probably carried more freight and more passengers than the Pennsylvania Railroad or the largest ocean liners. Long before wagons were invented, wheat, barley, wool and spices came across the desert on camels to Nineveh and Egypt.