276 Unexplored Spain 
the bactrians were set free in the marisma, wherein they have 
since lived at large and bred under wholly wild conditions for well- 
nigh a century. 
We admit that a statement of the existence of wild camels 
in these watery wildernesses of Spain—flooded during great part 
of the year—is difficult to accept. The camel is inseparably 
associated with the most arid deserts of earth, with sun-scorched 
Sahara, Arabia Petraea, and waterless tropical regions. Its 
physical economy is expressly adapted for such habitats—the 
huge padded feet and seven-chambered stomach that will sustain 
it for days without drinking. Yet the reader was asked to 
believe that this specialised desert-dweller had calmly accepted a 
condition of life diametrically reversed, and not only lives, but 
breeds and flourishes amidst knee-deep swamp. 
At the period of which we write the camel was not known to 
exist on earth in a wild state, and physical disabilities were 
alleged which would have precluded such a possibility. During 
historic times it had never been described save only as a beast of 
burden, the slave of man—and a savage, intractable slave at that. 
A little later, however, the Russian explorer, Préjevalsky, met 
with wild camels roaming over the Kumtagh deserts of Turkestan, 
and in Tibet Sven Hedin has since shown the two-humped 
camel to be one of the normal wild beasts of the Central Asian 
table-lands. 
Wild camels in Europe represented a considerable draft upon 
the credulity of readers ; and a chorus of ridicule was poured upon 
the statement. Men who had “lived in Spain for years””—a 
foreign consul at Seville, engineers employed in reclaiming 
marismas (somewhere else)—all rushed into print to attest the 
absurdity of the idea. Limited experience was mistaken for 
complete knowledge! Similar treatment was accorded to our 
observation of pelicans in Denmark. Ornithologists of Copen- 
hagen insinuated we did not know pelicans from seagulls; yet the 
Danish pelicans are as well known to the Jutlander fisher-folk as 
are the Spanish camels to the herdsmen and fowlers of the 
marisma. Knowledge is no monopoly of high places. 
The Spanish camels spend their lives exclusively in the open 
marisma, pasturing on the vetas, or higher-lying areas, and 
passing from islet to islet, though the intervening water be 
three feet deep. We have watched them grazing on subaquatic 
