Unlike other ships, this one begins by being a very feeble and helpless little craft indeed. For the first week after its launch on the great sea of life it requires much careful watching on the part of the owners.
Strange as it may sound, in very truth a baby camel is every whit as helpless as a human baby. It can not stand alone; without help it can not so much as take its own food even; while its long neck is at first so flexible and fragile, that unless some one were constantly at hand to watch, the poor little creature would run every risk of dislocating it.
Those who have closely observed camel nature tell us it is never known to play or frolic like lambs or colts, or like most young creatures of the earth, in fact; but that in its babyhood it is as grave and melancholy as in its old age, born apparently with a deep sense of its own ugliness, and a mournful resignation to a long and joyless career.
When it has reached its third year the humpbacked animal is counted old enough to begin its life of labor. The trainers then take it in hand. They teach it to kneel and bear burdens, which gradually they make heavier and heavier, until their charge is supposed to have come to the full strength of camel maturity. This is not until it is about eight years old.
If the camel can rise with the load on its back, this is proof positive that he can carry it throughout the journey, although it sometimes happens, if the journey be only a very short one, the patient beast is loaded so heavily that it must be helped on to its feet by means of bars and levers. In some places camels cry out against this excessive loading in a most piteous and distressing manner—the cry resembling that of a very young child in pain, and being a most dismal sound to hear; but in other parts of the world they will bear their burden, however heavy, without complaining.
THE CAMEL AND HIS RIDER.
An ordinary camel's load is from seven to eight hundred pounds. With this weight on their backs, a train of camels will cross thirty miles of desert during a day. Those used to carry dispatches, having only the light weight of the dispatch-bearer, of course are expected to travel much faster, however, and will easily accomplish two hundred and forty miles in the same length of time.
Ungainly, awkward, repulsive-looking as these creatures are, with their great projecting harelips and their hairy humps, they have the compensation of being most priceless treasures to all those who "dwell in tents" in the vast sandy plains of Egypt, Arabia, and Tartary.
Their stomachs are so formed by nature that they are capable of being converted into a set of water tanks, a number of small cells filled with the purest water being fastened to the sides of each, and when all food fails, it makes little difference to a camel or dromedary—at least for a time.