OF CAMELS
"When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our Kafilas wind through the Khyber pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Light are the purses but heavy the bales,
As the snow-bound trade of the North comes down
To the market-square of Peshawar town.
"In a turquoise twilight crisp and chill,
A Kafila camped at the foot of the hill.
Then blue smoke haze of the cooking rose,
And tent-peg answered to hammer nose;
And the picketed ponies, shag and wild,
Strained at their ropes as the feed was piled;
And the bubbling camels beside the load
Sprawled for a furlong adown the road;
And the Persian pussy-cats, brought for sale,
Spat at the dogs from the camel-bale."
_The ballad of the King's jest._--R. K.
[Illustration:]
While some mahouts hint vaguely that the elephant came to India from the
farther East, it is an accepted belief that the camel came from the West,
_i.e._ from Arabia. No account is taken of the herds of wild camels seen on
the high table-lands of Central Asia. So the saying has it, "The camel let
loose, goes westward," or "The camel is a good Mussulman, for when free,
he runs towards Mecca." In default of proof that the beast really follows
the setting sun, it may be suspected that Oriental fancy, always strong,
has more play than Oriental observation, which is often weak. For the camel
is a peculiarly Muhammadan creature both in his life of to-day and in his
wonderful origin. It was on his back that the body of Shah Ali Shah was
laid after death, and he was sent into the wilderness till the Angel
Gabriel met him and, taking the rope, led him no man knows whither. Before
that ghostly funeral the camel resembled a horse, but the Angel gave him a
hump like the mountain into which he disappeared, and feet to spread on the
yielding sand, with other anatomical peculiarities, all duly enumerated by
good Mussulmans. This story is also told of Moses, the friend of God, or
the converser with God, the place of whose sepulchre no man knoweth unto
this day. Probably the saying has its origin in the propensity of the
stupid camel to stray and lose itself, for it has none of the "homing"
faculty so strongly developed in the horse. People who religiously face
westward several times a day to pray naturally get an occidental twist in
their minds. Nay, there are those who maintain that all the world has this
trick, and that, like Wordsworth's friends, we still go "stepping
westward." South Australia has not yet discovered a Mecca twist in the
thousands of camels it now owns.
The Prophet himself was a camel driver or _Serwán_, and always cherished
the liking of a true Arab for the beast of which he said, "Speak ill
neither of the camel nor of the wind; the camel is a benefit to man and the
wind is an emanation of the Spirit of God." When he was married to Kadijah,
two young camels were slain for the wedding feast.
But Indian popular observation lacks the Arab keenness, nor is the beast so
important and highly thought of as in Arabia. There is no strong insight in
calling the long shafts of the camel's limbs crooked, as in the angry
saying to a shifty ne'er-do-well, "O camel, hast thou _one_ straight bone
in thy body?" The pride of a big man is rebuked by the saying, "The camel
thought he was the biggest thing in the world till he came under the
mountain." Of a very tall man who, in India, is often a simpleton, they
say, "Tall as a camel, but silly as an ass," and of an unwilling, grumbling
servant, "He snarls like a camel when you load him." The bite of a camel is
very severe and sometimes poisonous, so the saying goes, "God preserve us
from the nip of a camel and the snap of a dog." Of a notoriously unlucky
man they say, "Even if he were perched on a camel a dog would jump up and
bite him." The Kirgiz have a pious expansion of this saying: "Whom the
fates bless with a good son may light a bonfire; but the father cursed with
a bad son will be devoured by dogs, though he be mounted on the back of a
camel." We express the completeness of ill-luck by saying, "The bread never
falls but on its buttered side." The Kirgiz say, "One never falls but from
a _nár_"--the large-sized Bokhariot camel. A common saying similar to our
"waiting to see which way the cat jumps" is based on a trivial story. A
potter and a greengrocer hired a camel between them. The camel reached
round with his long neck and ate some of the cabbages on the greengrocer's
side, whereupon the potter jeered. "Wait and see which side he sits down
upon," said the greengrocer. The camel sat down on the potter's side and
smashed his wares. Æsop's frog tried to swell himself as big as the ox,
but in India they say of pretentious little people, "When the camels were
branded, the frog also held up his leg," as who should say, "brand me too."
"The goat-keeper went to buy a camel and wanted to feel its ears" (a point
of handling which no judicious goat-buyer omits) is a saying which has
several applications in India; but in Britain also we may see critics
a-tiptoe, reaching up with tiny and inapt canons of judgment to things they
do not understand.
The decorative value of the camel cannot be appreciated by those who have
only seen one or two at a time. He was made for a sequence, as beads are
made for stringing. On an Indian horizon a long drove of camels, tied head
to tail, adorns the landscape with a festooned frieze of wonderful symmetry
and picturesqueness. Five hundred camels go to a mile.[3] If I had a very
long and lofty hall to decorate I should pray the architect to let me loop
it round with camels, with here and there a Biloch driver, as the frieze
turned a corner or was interrupted by a bracket or girder. For a quaint and
almost comic spectacle, a bivouac of a camel Kafila or caravan on the march
is not easily surpassed. The beasts are seated four or five on each side of
a sheet or table-cloth on which their fodder is placed. Camels are as
symmetrically constructed as gun-carriages, and their hind-legs fold up
like two-foot-rules. They rest in great part on a pedestal behind the chest
with which Nature has furnished them, and sit close together in
high-elbowed state with an indescribable air of primness and propriety.
With, as often happens, a driver supping at each end of this table in the
wilderness, the whole arrangement has an absurdly formal and well-regulated
air, suggesting a tea-party of elderly maiden ladies, as the long necks
curve and bridle and the mincing mouths move busily.
[Footnote 3: This is the present official estimate, allowing a little over
10 feet 6 inches per camel. Sir Charles Napier, however, writing of his
first day's march from Rori to Imaín Ghur in the Sindh desert, allows 15
feet to each animal: "Oh! the baggage! the baggage! it is enough to drive
one mad. We have 1500 camels with their confounded long necks, each
occupying 15 feet! Fancy these long devils in a defile; four miles and a
quarter of them!"]
The deliberate movement of the beasts under their burdens is impressive and
not without a touch of scornful majesty. Only an Oriental, one would think,
could accommodate himself to that unhasting cadence of step. Perhaps the
reported existence of wild camels in Arizona territory is a fabulous or
jocular illustration of American character. It is said they were imported
into the United States to serve as pack animals, but nobody foresaw that
the nervous, electric American was the last man alive to pace placidly at
the end of a camel's nose-rope. He naturally dropped it in disgust;--and
now there are wild camels in Arizona. If this story is not true, it ought
to be.
[Illustration: IN A SERAI (REST-HOUSE)]
[Illustration: RAJPUT CAMEL-RIDER'S BELT]
The truth about the camel's character has often been debated. He is
wonderful, and, in his own way, beautiful to look at, and his patience,
strength, speed, and endurance are beyond all praise. The camel-riders of
Rajputana and Central India, mounted on animals of a swift breed, cover
almost incredible distances at high speed, finding it necessary to protect
themselves against the racking motion by broad leathern belts tightly
buckled, which are often covered with velvet and prettily broidered in
silk. Even they, who know the beast at his best, never pretend to like
their mounts, as one likes a horse. So useful a beast is estimable, but the
most indulgent observation fails to find a ground for affection. Europeans,
at all events, who have to do with camels seem to think it were as easy to
lavish one's love on a luggage van. He is a morose, discontented, grumbling
brute, a servant of man, it is true, as is the water that turns a
mill-wheel, the fire that boils a kettle, or the steam that stirs the
piston of a cylinder. He does not come to a call like other beasts, but has
to be fetched and driven from browsing. There are but few words made for
his private ear such as belong to horses, dogs, and oxen. An elephant has a
separate word of command for sitting down with front legs, with hind legs,
or with all together, and he moves at a word. A camel has but one, and that
must be underlined with a tug at his nose-rope ere he will stoop. But he
has a large share in that great public property of curses whose loss would
enrich the world.
The camel has so little sense, one wonders he is credited with malevolence,
but so it is, and there is sound appreciation of his vindictiveness in a
phrase in use for bearing malice, equivalent to "camel-tempered," and of
his aimless wandering in another addressed to an idle man, "Why are you
loafing round like a loose camel?"
"Camel colour" is a common word among weavers, embroiderers, and the like;
but it is not a good colour name, because camels vary much in tint. Other
names of this end of the colour scale are better, as "_badámi_" or almond;
"mouse colour"; _khâki_, or _khara_, catechu tinted. An ostrich is a
camel-bird, and so says Western science,--_struthio camelus_,--and a
giraffe a camel-cow; no notice apparently being taken of the creature's
spots.
The camel's grumble has led the British soldier to christen him "a
humming-bird." "Commissariat scent-bottle" has also been heard, and when in
camp with camels, you see more in these schoolboy absurdities than would
strike a stranger. The relations of the British soldier with the camel,
however, have been so vividly and truly put in my son's barrack-room
ballad, "Oonts!" (camels), that I make no apology for quoting it at
length,--premising that Mr. Thomas Atkins, who takes his own way with
Oriental languages, invariably shortens long vowels, and makes _oont_ rhyme
with grunt.
OONTS!
(NORTHERN INDIA TRANSPORT TRAIN)
What makes the soldier's 'eart to penk, what makes 'im to perspire?
It isn't standin' up to charge or lyin' down to fire;
But it's everlastin' waitin' on a everlastin' road
For the commissariat camel and 'is commissariat load.
O the oont, O the oont, O the commissariat oont!
With 'is silly neck a bobbin' like a basket full o' snakes,
We packs 'im like a idol, an' you ought to hear 'im grunt,
An' when we gets 'im loaded up, 'is blesséd girth-rope breaks.
What makes the rearguard swear so 'ard when night is drorin' in,
An' every native follower is shiverin' for 'is skin?
It ain't the chance o' bein' rushed by Paythans from the 'ills,
It's the commissariat camel puttin' on 'is blesséd frills.
O the oont, O the oont, O the hairy, scary oont!
A trippin' over tent-ropes when we've got the night alarm,
We socks 'im with a stretcher-pole an' 'eads 'im off in front,
And when we've saved 'is bloomin' life, he chaws our bloomin'
arm.
The 'orse 'e knows above a bit, the bullock's but a fool,
The elephant's a gentleman, the baggage mule's a mule;
But the commissariat cam-u-el, when all is said and done,
'E's a devil an' a ostrich an' a orphan child in one.
O the oont, O the oont, O the Gawd forsaken oont!
The 'umpy lumpy 'ummin'-bird a singin' where 'e lies,
'E's blocked the 'ole division from the rearguard to the front,
An' when we gets 'im up again--the beggar goes an' dies!
'E'll gall an' chafe an' lame an' fight--'e smells most awful vile,
'E'll lose 'isself for ever if you let 'im stray a mile;
'E's game to graze the 'ole day long an' 'owl the 'ole night through,
And when 'e comes to greasy ground 'e splits 'isself in two.
O the oont, O the oont, O the floppin' droppin' oont!
When 'is long legs gives from under, an' 'is meltin' eye is dim,
The tribes is up be'ind us an' the tribes is out in front,
It ain't no jam for Tommy, but it's kites and crows for 'im.
So when the cruel march is done, an' when the roads is blind,
An' when we sees the camp in front an' 'ears the shots be'ind,
O then we strips 'is saddle off, an' all 'is woes is past:
'E thinks on us that used 'im so, an' gets revenge at last!
O the oont, O the oont, O the floatin' bloatin' oont!
The late lamented camel in the water-cut he lies.
We keeps a mile be'ind 'im an' we keeps a mile in front,
But 'e gets into the drinkin' casks, an' then, of course,
we dies.
Through the humorous lilt of these lines you may perceive many facts,
especially the mortality among camels in our Afghan campaigns. In that of
1878-1879, about 50,000 camels were paid for by the British Government. But
this was in no wise the fault of the brutal Briton, for the beasts were
deliberately sacrificed by their native owners, who were guaranteed
compensation for their loss. It was easier to allow the camel to die than
to toil after him over a difficult country. It is now laid down as an axiom
of the Transport service that animals required to proceed beyond the bases,
and to act with troops in the field, should be the property of the
Government, while the transport of supplies within the bases should be
mainly hired. But on the next pinch the chances are that the axiom will be
disregarded. A history of the military services of the camel would be the
history of Eastern wars. He has served and served well both as baggage cart
and troop-horse, and whether from stupidity or courage is as stolid and
unmoved under attack as were the British infantry squares at Waterloo.
Herodotus, Pliny, Livy, Diodorus, and Xenophon are quoted by Major Burn of
the Intelligence Branch in his excellent official manual on Transport and
Camel Corps. In modern campaigns camel corps were organised by Napoleon in
Egypt, Sir Charles Napier in Sindh, by Carbuccia in Algeria, and during the
Indian Mutiny the "Ninety-twa" Highlanders had a camel corps of 150 native
drivers, and 155 well-bred camels on which sat 150 kilted Highlanders. Sir
Charles Napier's Sindh camel corps seems to have been the most complete in
design and equipment, and in every way worthy of that great soldier's
genius. The principle on which it was based is the plainest of all the
plain truths ignored by our system--that the transport is the most vital
part of military matters, and should be organised with just as much care as
a regiment. In an expedition for the capture of a robber chief in Sindh,
Sir Charles Napier's camel corps travelled 70 miles during the night,
captured the thief, and returned, thus accomplishing 140 miles in
twenty-four hours. Feats of this kind, of course, were not continuous, and
their bringing-off was due to the care with which the rest and upkeep of
the animals were maintained. This splendid property organised in 1845 was
allowed to die down, and no such efficient organisation existed in
subsequent campaigns, where money, hastily spilled like water, purchased
discomfort and sickness for the troops, and that tardy and confused
movement of his masses which breaks the heart of an anxious general.
As a rule, the management of camels should be left to Orientals, though the
French say their men learned to imitate the Arab camel cries. Our Thomas
Atkins is a poor ventriloquist, ill at outland tongues. Like his officers,
too, he cherishes the ancient illusion, filtered down from book to book,
about the extra water-tank stomach of the camel, and his power of going
without water. As a plain physiological fact, the camel has no such
chamber, his digestive arrangements are like those of the ox, but simpler,
approaching the horse character; and, if he goes without water, it is only
because he cannot get it. There are pouches in his stomach, which
frequently after death are found to contain fluid; but that they are
reservoirs pure and simple is doubtful, says Mr. J. H. Steel in his _Manual
of the Camel_. "It is very certain that the parched traveller who cuts open
his dying camel to obtain its water store will thus procure only a very
little fluid of a temperature of about 90° Fahr., of a mawkish, sub-acid
flavour and an unpleasant odour." He should be watered twice a day in the
hot weather, and once in the cool season. It is true, of course, that he
has been known to go dry for seven or eight days, but it was labour and
sorrow to him. Also, although he can travel twenty miles a day, carrying
360 lbs. weight, he is capable of fatigue as other beasts are, and once out
of condition does not regain his strength in less than six months. And in
spite of his unfriendly and unsympathetic disposition, it is a fact that,
like the rest of God's creatures, he is more tractable under kind treatment
that when bullied and roughly handled. Of a man we sometimes say "he has an
unfortunate manner," nor do we always mean it, for such a manner often
shows the aggressive selfishness and ill-temper that command fortune and
respect. The supercilious expression framed in the camel's lips, which
disclose with savage threat the long upper teeth, denied by nature to other
ruminants, and his curiously indifferent air, are real misfortunes to him.
We bow respectfully to the camel-tempered man of private life, but it is
hard to be civil to a beast whose face is a sculptured sneer.
The long-shanked, cushion-footed creature is especially good at fording
rivers where the bottom is sandy. A drove going across will sometimes make
a ford practicable for horses, acting like a roller on a loose road, but a
few yards of greasy clay will throw many a camel. A fair slope is not much
of an obstacle, but a steep hill of slippery wet clay, up which a mule goes
gaily, is a sad business for the camel. Nature has made his shoulder,
chest, and fore-legs strong, but the attachments of the hind limbs are weak
and ill-considered. So the beast is liable to dislocations of the hip in
climbing, or, as the British soldier says, "he splits 'isself up." Some
Afghan short-legged breeds are good climbers, but of most the Arab saying
holds good: "Which is best for you, O camel, to go up hill or down? May
God's curse rest on both wherever met, quoth the camel." None the less, at
this moment long strings are pacing with heavy burdens up and down the hill
roads to Kashmir, Simla, and Kábul.
[Illustration: RAJPUT CAMEL GUNS]
Camels, like mules, can be used to carry field-pieces, the equipment of a
gun being divided among three animals. The indigenous practice was to make
the beast himself a gun-carriage, bearing a Zambūrah (wasp), a piece like
our old falconet or like the heavy swivel muskets sometimes seen in English
armouries, intended for the tops of a ship or the stern sheets of a boat.
The saddle also carries a rider who holds the heavy wooden stock and fires
the gun with a slow match. The lingering nature of this arrangement must in
action have lent a lively interest to the evolutions of a gun camel, for
there is always the chance that just at the critical moment the beast may
sling round and point the gun at its friends. Another camel gun is a sort
of _mitrailleuse_, carrying twenty-one barrels in a framework of
iron-clamped wood. Both these contrivances are still in as much use as the
brooding pax Britannica allows in Rajputana, especially at Oodeypore and
Jeypore, and make a great figure in State processions when salutes are
fired. The Sikhs had a great number of camel guns of the Zambūrah type, and
at the battle of Sobraon it is said that over 2000 were captured. Some of
these still survive in the armoury at Fort Lahore.
Besides his services as a slow-pacing pack animal and as a steed capable of
covering long distances at a high speed, the camel has many uses unnoticed
by Europeans. He is blindfolded in Sindh and made to go a mill-round,
grinding flour or oil seeds; working sometimes in such a confined space,
one wonders how they got the huge beast in, or how they will get him out
again. He takes the place of the ox at the plough and the well, and acts as
water-carrier in parts of Rajputana, on the edges of the Indian desert and
in the camel districts of the Punjab. On the Grand Trunk road to Delhi are
wonderful double-storied wagons drawn by camels. These old-world
contrivances go at the rate of about three miles per hour, and are like
nothing so much as the cage wagons of travelling menageries. They are in
effect iron cages intended originally as a protection against robbery. The
passengers are huddled together and seem to sleep most of the time, and, to
do him justice, so does the driver. The most picturesque "property" of the
Punjab Government house is a huge _char à banc_, to which is harnessed a
team of four or six fine camels with leopard skin housings and gaily
attired riders. The camel van will probably be run off the road by the
railway, but modified versions of it must for long survive in the desert
regions off the line of rail.
It ought to be unnecessary to say that while one camel is like another to
an untrained European eye, there are in India, as in Arabia, carefully
classified breeds, though they are not distinctively branded with caste
marks, as is the case in the West. One listens to this lore with respect,
but it is not easily remembered, nor is it of much importance, save to the
camel owner or the Government officer sent forth at tuck of drum to buy or
hire all the good camels he can lay hands on. By common consent the very
best of the animals of the plain are considered to be those of Bikanir and
Jessulmir, Rajput States on the edge of the great Indian desert, where the
hot dry air suits the austere Arab constitution of the beast. But it has a
wider range of variety than is generally thought, each suited to its
_habitat_, until in the hills the slender, high-caste form becomes square,
sturdy, and thickly covered with a coarse, cold-resisting pelage. The
two-humped Bactrian camel is prepared by nature to withstand a cold almost
as keen and piercing as that the reindeer feels, and yet will breed with
the one-humped camel of the burning plain. Signor Lombardini, an authority
on cameline anatomy, finds a rudimentary second hump in the ordinary
one-humped camel.
After the he-goat, a whole camel seems a large offering for the most pious
person to make, but he still occasionally serves as a sacrifice. Colonel
Tod wrote that the Great Mogul used to slay a camel with his own hand on
the new year festival, and the flesh was eaten by the court favourites. He
is certainly eaten, and they say camel in good condition much resembles
beef. After his death his bones are valuable, being whiter and more dense
than most other bones, and a fair substitute for ivory. But they are
neglected except by the lac-turners of Dera Ismail Khan, who use them for
the studs and ornaments with which they adorn their ware. Possibly some
camel bones are picked by English turners and button-makers out of the
Indian bones now imported. It may not be generally known that the attention
of traders has been recently drawn to the cattle remains that lie near
Indian villages. Each hamlet has its Golgotha, where worn-out animals are
left to die. Hitherto, only the vulture, the crow, and the jackal have
visited these spots, after the leather-dresser has taken the skin of the
last comer. But though it never occurred to the Oriental that they could be
of any use, Western science, like the giant in the child's tale, grinds
bones to make bread. So the village bone-heaps are swept up and shipped to
Europe. Perhaps a day may come when the people, awaking to their value,
will cry out that they have been robbed. The bone heaps will certainly be
missed by the scientific Indian agriculturists of the future, but there is
no way of keeping them in the country. Learned authorities on economic
questions say it is a mistake to use customs duties with any beneficent
intention, just as literary critics say it is bad art to write a story with
a purpose, and both have some right on their side. Otherwise, in the
interests of India, one would like to impose a heavy export duty on wild
bird skins, feathers, and bones, and a crushing import duty on aniline dyes
and Members of Parliament.
[Illustration: THE LEADING CAMEL OF A KAFILA (AFGHANISTAN)]
Camel trappings are not so gaudy in India as in Egypt or Morocco, where
riding animals are bedizened in scarlet and yellow. They are in a different
key of colour, belonging to a school of pastoral ornament in
soberly-coloured wools, beads, and small white shells, which appears to
begin (or end) in the Balkans and stretches eastward through Central Asia
into India, especially among the Biloch and other camel folk on our
North-West frontier. Camel housings may be the beginning of the nomad
industry of carpet weaving. It is perhaps not too fanciful to trace on the
worsted neckband the original unit or starting-point of the carpets and
"saddle-bags" which have given lessons to English upholsterers. There is
not much room for variety in a narrow fillet with only black, brown, and
dingy white as a colour scheme, but you may watch a long Kafila go
curtseying past and find no two neck-bands quite alike in the arrangement
of zig-zags, diamonds, bars, and squares. These bands, with more richly
coloured rugs and saddle-bags, and the homely russet splendours of worsted
cords, tassels, shells, and beads, with which the leading camel is adorned,
are wrought by women. Like more women's work, it is done at intervals. The
English lady complains that her Turkoman or Biloch rug lies unevenly on her
parquet floor, and does not reflect that the perverse "buckling" marks the
times when camp was shifted to follow the pasturing flocks, and the loom
with its unfinished carpet was rolled up to be staked anew with Oriental
carelessness as to straightness. "Saddle-bags," said a London tradesman to
me, "have had their day, they've got common." This sounded sadly, but they
will not cease to be for all that.