THE ARAB’S DEBT TO HIS CAMEL 
enables him to eat hard and thorny plants — the pasture of the desert. 
His ears are very small, and his nostrils, large for breathing, are specially 
capable of closure by valvelike folds against the fearful simoon. His 
eyes are prominent, but protected by a heavy overhanging lid, limiting 
vision upward, and guarding from the direct rays of the noon sun... . 
His hump is not a fictional but a real and acknowledged reservoir of nutri- 
ment, as well as nature’s packsaddle for the commerce of the ages. . . . 
“The Arabian domicile is indebted to the camel for nearly all it holds. 
All that can be obtained from the camel is of value. Fuel, milk, excellent 
hair for tents, ropes, shawls, and coarser fabrics are obtained from the 
living animal; and flesh food, leather, bones, and other useful substances 
from the dead. Even the footprints of the camel, though soon obliterated, 
are of special value in the desert. A lighter or smaller foot would leave no 
tracks, but the camel’s foot leaves data for the Bedouin science of athar, — 
the art of navigation for the ship of the desert. Camel tracks are gossip 
and science, history and philosophy to the Arab caravan. A camel march 
is the standard measure of distance in all Arabia, and the price of a milch 
camel the standard of value in the interior. .. Camel’s milk is the 
staple diet of thousands in Arabia, even though it be bitter because of 
wormwood pasturage.” — ZwemER, Arabia, the Cradle of Islam. 
In all these centuries, however, little if anything has been 
gained toward sympathetic association between the beast and 
its master. “‘The want of bodily beauty is accompanied by a 
viciousness of temper and general stupidity of disposition which 
can scarcely be paralleled elsewhere among domesticated ani- 
mals.” Before long it will be superseded by railroads. 
We are accustomed to think of this animal as belonging only 
to the heated sand wastes or rocky plateaus of the arid belt 
stretching from India to Morocco and Somaliland; but the two- 
humped “Bactrian” camel is a northern form as enduring of 
cold as is its southern fellow of heat; and the overland trade 
between China and Russia, across the plains of Mongolia or 
Turkestan, proceeds by caravans of these animals amid the 
snows of winter as well as through summer’s dust. 
“Every year toward spring,” the Abbé Huc noted in Mongolia, ‘‘the 
camel loses its hair, and it all goes, to the last fragment, before the new 
Z 337 
