The Camels – Clumsy Animals
"The Ship of the Desert"
Clumsy and slow, yet
steadfast and wise,
Across the scorching sands it strides—
A living vessel, sun-baked, lean,
The desert’s lord, its patient queen.
No hoof, but padded,
soft and wide,
It treads where brittle dunes abide.
No storm of sand, no furnace air
Can halt its march through wastelands bare.
For Abraham, a wealth
untold,
For Job, three thousand—priceless gold.
Through Sheba’s pomp, through caravans,
It bore the dreams of desert clans.
And as it walked, the
poets sang—
Of battles fierce, of love’s sweet pang,
Of dark-eyed maids and cooling streams,
Of phantom oases in their dreams.
The rhythm swayed with
every stride,
The verses matched the beast’s slow glide.
Then faster songs would lift its head,
And drive it forth where silence fled.
No water is stored in
secret cells,
No magic hump where liquid dwells—
Just flesh and fat, endurance true,
And salt to drink when journeys are through.
Oh clumsy beast, so strange, so grand,
You shaped the fate of sealess land.
Without your strength, without your tread,
The desert’s songs would all lie dead.
Below, I give a brief historical and biological account. Story:
To
the big populations of the East, the camel has for centuries been meat and
drink, dress, war steed and baggage animal, the one animated vessel capable of
carrying man and his wares across an ocean of sun-scorched sand. The camel has
been called the ship of the desert.
We
cannot date the domestication of the camel. It runs back to prehistoric times.
A papyrus more than thirty-three centuries old mentions this priceless beast.
Heat and harsh land in the Middle East, cold lands more bitter and barren in
the Far East have made the camel necessary to human life in those regions.
The
Old Testament scenes always have camels in the background. These beasts were
wealth to Abraham. Job was the "greatest man of the East" because, in
addition to sheep and oxen, he had three thousand camels,
All
the great Bible journeys, the Queen of Sheba's gorgeous cavalcade to Jerusalem
and the long journeys from all parts of the Holy Land; the convoys bringing
merchandise to the Mediterranean ports for distribution throughout the West
were carried out by camel labor. And there is this romantic fact to be added,
that the first fruits of Arab literary genius are camel songs. As they made
their long, monotonous journeys across the burning deserts. The old poetic sons
of space composed verselets, keeping time with the footfalls of the beasts they
rode.
They
sang songs of dark-eyed maidens and streams tinkling clear in dreamland oases;
fierce rhymes of battle and of contests for wells. The meter was fixed by the
tread of the camels, and the beasts marched better in time to their masters'
voices than in silence. With a quickening of the songs, they raised their
heads, lengthened their stride, and hastened their speed; and new rhythms, more
complex lines, and couplets grew to match the new pace. And so Arabic
literature, or at least Arabic poetry, grew in the desert, beaten out beneath
the burning sky by men swaying and swinging to the lurching gait of the marching
camel on old caravan routes.
The
secret of the camel's unique value lies, as we all know, in the fact that these
animals are so footed that they do not sink, as a hard-hoofed mammal sinks into
the sand. They walk on it as a reindeer walks on snow, upon a well-padded foot
that spreads under the animal's weight.
How
a camel can march for days without drinking is amazing.
In
addition to that, they can march for several days through the desert without
drinking, though it is not true that a camel can support a huge burden through
the wilds for two or three weeks at a time without any chance of drinking. The
camel is as fond of water as a thirsty human being, and it has no special way
to store up the water. As in other animals, water is stored in the tissues all
over the body and is used as needed. After some days in the desert without
water, the camel is parched and shrunken. At the first oasis it is given salt
to eat, for salt helps the body tissues to store water; then the shrunken beast
drinks its fill and plumps out again amazingly.
It
was once thought that the peculiar cells in the first two compartments of the
camel's stomach were used to store water, but the water contained in the
stomach is not enough to do much good in the desert.
The
hump on the camel's back is almost all fat. When this fat is used up by the
body, water is produced by as much as ten gallons in a large camel. In
addition, the animal's body draws upon that reservoir of fatty nourishment for
the energy that it needs when food is scarce or lacking.
Sham
S. Misri
