84 THE CAMEL. 



On the ordinary routes, therefore, the camel is 

 not fed at all, even on long journeys, but is left to 

 snatch his food as he can during the march of 

 the caravan, or gather it more leisurely while it 

 halts. In a journey of seven weeks which I 

 made with these animals in Arabia Petraea, in 

 the months of May and June, but a single camel 

 of the caravan received any food from his driver. 

 This was a fine large animal bred by the Ababdeh 

 Arabs, which was fed at every evening halt with 

 from a pint to a quart of beans. His habit of 

 feeding as he walks is a serious inconvenience to 

 the traveller. At the commencement of the day's 

 march, he is ever on the look-out for the stunted 

 acacias and other prickly plants, which, with 

 occasionally a more succulent herb, constitute 

 almost his sole diet, and he snatches them in 

 passing, giving you an uncomfortable jerk as he 

 turns to seize them, or suddenly stops, at some 

 hazard of throwing you over his stooping shoul- 



the wandering Arabs, was once the seat of a dense popula- 

 tion. Throughout Arabia Petrasa and the greater Arabian 

 Peninsula, the valleys and depressions of the soil, and the 

 more moderate mountain slopes, are thinly dotted with aca- 

 cias, tamarisks, and numerous arborescent plants. The water- 

 courses of the winter streams, along which lie the usual routes 

 of travel, are marked, when not mere mountain torrents, by 

 belts of reeds and shrubs. Even proper grasses sparingly 

 occur also in small ravines, or on the rocky shelves which 

 retain a little earth and catch the falling moisture. 



