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