SPEED AND ENDURANCE. 



17 



feet five in<ilies. Mails have been carried from Bagdad to 

 Damascus, four hundred and eightj-two miles, in seven days ; 

 and, on one occasion, by means of regular relays of dromeda- 

 ries, Mahomed Ali sent an express to Ibrahim Paclia from 

 Cairo to Antioch, five hundred and sixty miles, in five days 

 and a half. Colonel Chesney says the swift dromedary can 

 make eight or nine miles per hour, and accomplish seventy 

 miles a day for several days in succession. Buckhardt, in his 

 " Travels in Nubia," states that the owner of a fine dromedary 

 laid a wager that he would ride the animal from Esneh to 

 Keneh, and back, a distance of one hundred and twenty-five 

 miles, between sun and sun. He accomplished one hundred 

 and fifteen miles, occupying twenty minutes in crossing and 

 re-crossing the Nile by ferry, in eleven hours, and then gave 

 up the wager. Buckhardt thinks this dromedary w^ould have 

 travelled one. hundred and eighty or two hundred miles in 

 twenty-fours without injury. The interesting paper extracted 

 from the notes of General Harlan, and printed in the United 

 States Patent Oflice Report of 1853, states that the ordinary 

 day's journey of the dromedary of Cabool is sixty miles, but 

 that picked animals will travel one hundred miles a day for 

 several days in succession, their greatest speed being about ten 

 miles an hour. \ 

 A French writer in the lievue Orientale says: 

 I knew a camel-driver who had bought a dromedary be- 

 longing to a sheriff of Mecca lately deceased at Cairo. This 

 animal often made the round trip betw^een that city and Suez, 

 going and returning, in twenty-four hours." The distance from 

 Cairo to Suez, as I have already stated, is eighty-four miles, 

 making one hundred and sixty-eight miles travel in twenty- four 

 hours. 



In an appendix to the work of General Carbuccia, by Jomard, 

 we find that a detachment of the celebrated dromedary regi- 

 ment, in the French army of Egypt, marched from Cairo to El 

 Arish, from El Arish to Suez, from Suez to Cairo, and from 

 Cairo to Pelusium, a distance in all of not less than six hundred 

 miles, in eight days, and he states that the ordinary day's march 

 of the regiment was thirty French leagues, or about seventy- 

 five miles, without a halt. 



Abd-el-Kader compares the pace of the dromedary to the 

 2 



