152 The Poets Beasts. 



motionless is just what camels like. Once begin to load 

 them, and the camel grumbles and roars as if its vitals were 

 being wrenched out. " So habitual is this conduct that if 

 a kneeling camel be only approached, and a stone as large 

 as a walnut laid on its back, it begins to remonstrate, groan- 

 ing as if it were being crushed to the earth with its load." ^ 

 '* We have all been to Egypt or Syria, and many of us have 

 been bitten by his long front teeth, trampled over by his 

 noiseless feet, deafened by his angry roar, and insulted by 

 the affected, not to say sanctimonious, iourmire of his head 

 and neck and the protrusion of his contemptuous upper 

 lip. No one who thus knows him at home retains a spark 

 of belief in the beast's patience, amiability, fidelity, or any 

 other virtue. The camel must be reckoned among the 

 lost illusions of youth ! " 2 



Urge it to get up on to its legs, and it remonstrates voci- 

 ferously ; but once get it going, with the string through its 

 nose tied to the tail of the camel in front of it, and it will 

 keep on going just as long as the one in front of it keeps 

 on pulling its nose. But the moment one camel in a line 

 stops, they all stop. There is " patience " of course in this 

 perpetual plodding, but, so far from being admirable, it 

 used to exasperate the British soldier, both in Afghanistan 

 and Egypt, into the most ludicrous paroxysms of indigna- 

 tion. The brutes moved like machines, at a regulated rate 

 of motion, and not one step would they take faster than 

 another. To the bewilderment of Tommy Atkins, they 

 paid no attention whatever to sticks ; but suddenly, as if it 

 had made up its mind that life was not worth more trouble, 

 a camel would come down on its knees with a thump — 

 and there remain. The gap would be made good, the file 

 pass on, and the sulking camel be left where it had knelt, 

 with its head upheld superciliously in the air and gazing 



' " liible Animals," Rev. J. G. Wood. 

 ^ " False Beasts and True," 



