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.
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.
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.”
There are two lessons we can learn from the camel, and I think all the boys and girls who read this chapter will like to know them. The first is, how to bear a burden and never complain. The secret of carrying this burden you will see when the caravan prepares for the long journey. Every camel kneels down to receive its load in the morning; every camel kneels down to have its load taken off in the evening. And that is why he is able to carry his burden to the end of the desert road. How much easier the great burden of a lost world in need of the Gospel could be carried, if we all learned to kneel morning and evening! To kneel and have the Master’s hand lay the burden on us, and the same hand take it off. Then we would feel the responsibility, and yet not miss the quietness and rest of real missionary service. Will you not kneel to-night, and to-morrow, and ask Jesus to teach you this lesson? Because, you know, the burden of these heathen lands is very heavy. There is on all of them, on Arabia too, the burden of sin, and of suffering, and of sorrow. What an awful burden! And yet the Bible tells us, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
The second lesson is that of patience, which is the chief virtue of the camel, the most necessary virtue for every little missionary, and absolutely necessary for every big missionary. As the long train of camels goes on through the narrow sand path and between the thorn-shrubs of the wilderness, step by step, without sound and without ceasing, tramp, tramp, tramp, I have often thought of the text: “They shall walk and not faint.” Patient walking is better than impatient hurrying, in mission work and everything else. Patient waiting, too, you can learn from the camel. To wait patiently for results and not to dig up the seed we have sown before it sprouts. The Great Husbandman has long patience over every seed that He sows; why should not we?
“Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate,
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.”