Have you ever seen such a desert ship? A large, bony animal, six or seven feet high to the top of its hump, and rude and ungainly in appearance. Its neck is long, but curved beautifully. Its ears are ridiculously small, and the upper lip is cleft nearly to the nose, while the lower lip hangs down, and gives the whole face the appearance of “having the blues.”
The camel has many uses. When too old to carry a burden, it is used for food. Camel’s milk is very wholesome. Camel’s hair is used for making both fine and coarse cloths, and the skin is used for sandals, water-bags and thongs.
A Swift Dromedary and an Arab Post-rider
The dromedary is the swift post-camel, which carries its rider on long journeys seventy miles a day on the stretch. A caravan of ordinary camels is like a freight train and is intended to go slowly and surely with its heavy load of merchandise; but a company of dromedary riders is like a limited express. The ordinary caravan travels six hours a day and about three miles an hour, but a good dromedary can perform wonders on the road. A merchant once rode the entire distance from El Kasim to Taif and back, over seven hundred miles in fifteen days; and a post-rider at Maan in North Arabia can deliver a message at Damascus, two hundred miles away, at the end of three days. The ordinary camel is like a packhorse, but the dromedary by careful breeding has become a race-horse. The camel is thick-built, heavy footed, ungainly, jolting. The dromedary has more slender limbs, finer hair, a lighter step, a wonderfully easy pace and is more enduring of thirst. All the camels in Arabia have a single hump. The two-humped camel, which you sometimes see in the circus, does not come from Arabia, but from Central Asia. As for the ordinary camel, his life is as hard as the desert soil and as barren of all comfort as the desert is bare of grass. Surely, no animal would have more right to feel sulky and dull. Always in hard use as a beast of burden, underfed and overloaded in the desert land where even a thorny bush is considered a tit-bit, and where water costs money, it is no fun at all to be a camel.
Yet to describe the camel is to describe God’s goodness to the desert dwellers. The Arabs have a saying that the camel is the greatest of all blessings given by Allah to mankind; and when Mohammed, the prophet, wished to call attention to the providence and loving-kindness of God among the Bedouins, who were not at all religious, he said, “And will ye not look then at the camel how she is created?” With his long neck he is able to reach far out among the desert shrubs on both sides of his pathway and to eat as he trudges along. The skin of his month is so thick and tough that it enables him to eat hard and thorny plants, the only herbage of the desert. The camel’s ears are very small so that he can close them when the desert storm begins and the sand-drifts come like a snow-storm. But his nostrils are large for breathing and yet can be closed up tight during the fearful simoom or hot desert winds. His eyes are protected by heavy, overhanging lids against the direct rays of the noon sun, and his cushioned feet are adapted for the ease of the rider and of the animal himself. Five horny pads, one on each knee, and one under the breast, support the animal when kneeling to receive a burden or when he rests on the hot sand. The camel’s hump was nature’s pack-saddle for the commerce of many lands and for many ages. The arched backbone which supports the hump is constructed, just like the Brooklyn Bridge, to sustain the greatest weight in proportion to the span. A strong camel can bear one thousand pounds’ weight, although the usual load is not more than six hundred pounds. The camel is the most useful of all domestic animals, as you can see in the pictures. He can carry burdens or draw water or carry the swift post or bring in fire-wood from the desert, or grind corn. While still living he provides fuel, milk, excellent hair for making tents, ropes, and shawls. And when dead the Arabs eat his flesh for food, use his leather to make sandals, and the big broad shoulder-blades are used as slates in the day-schools in many parts of Arabia. A camel march is the standard of distance among the Arabs, and the price of a milch camel is the standard of value among the Bedouins of the desert. The camel is the most patient animal in existence, and yet he often has an ugly temper and is undoubtedly stupid to a degree. He will never attempt to throw you off his back, but if you fall off he will never dream of stopping for you; and if turned loose in the desert, it is a chance of a thousand to one whether he will find his way back to his accustomed home or pasture. When the camel becomes angry, he bends back his long, snaky neck and opens his big jaws to bite. Do you notice the powerful jaws of the camels in the pictures? Yet with all his faults, his ungainly gait, and his ugly appearance, you cannot help loving this ship of the desert when once you have made a zigzag journey on camel-back with the Arab caravans. Perched high in the air you feel as if you were riding on a church steeple or an aeroplane and the swinging, swaying motion after you become used to it is as good as that of a pleasure yacht in New York Bay when the wind is blowing. Then you feel like singing with the Arab poet:
“Roast meat and milk; the swinging ride
On a camel sure and tried,
Which her master speeds amain
O’er low dale and level plain.”