SPEED AND ENDURANCE. 



15 



camels, with heads erect, already scenting the pure air of the 

 offing, their drivers gayly singing, or shouting farewell to the 

 friends they leave behind, stirs the blood like the sight of a 

 gallant sliip, its deck alive with cheery mariners, its sails belly- 

 ing in the breeze, as, with creaking spars and straining rigging, 

 it bows its head before the freshening blast, spurning the slavish 

 waters of the shore, and leaping to the freedom of the sea. 

 Again, in your travels on some bright, sunshiny morning, you 

 behold them, with their white awnings spread, coming up above 

 the distant horizon of the plain, swinging and rolling across the 

 intervening expanse, and bearing majestically down upon you, 

 for all the world like a homeward-bound Eastlndiaman runninof 

 before the wind from Good Hope down to St. Helena. Then, 

 when they arrive in port, and their cargoes are discharged, no 

 awkward floundering or lying on their side to rest, as other 

 animals do, like a ship stranded or hove out when she is a liulk 

 and not a ship, but, doubling their limbs under them, they 

 come down handsomely fore and aft, and so lie, gallantly swing- 

 ing at their anchorage, moored stem and stern, like a frigate in 

 the Downs. 



Yet it must not be supposed that it is all plain and prosper- * 

 ous sailing on these seas of sand. Eastern people are proverb- 

 ially improvident, and, in case of accident, are soon on short 

 allowance. Sometimes springs dry up in the desert, and cara- 

 vans stray in search of others till they are lost. Sometimes all 

 provision fails. Sometimes the fatal simoom strikes them. Then 

 shipwrecks occur in those vast solitudes, as was the case with a 

 Syrian caravan of three thousand camels and six hundred men 

 which perished in 1858, near Hara Iji Sheham. It was bound 

 from Damascus to Bagdad, and lost the way. ISTo Bedouin 

 happened to be within reach, and a tribe came upon their 

 remains long after their death." If any of their number put 

 off on fleet beasts in search of aid, as boats sometimes do from 

 sinking ships, they, too, perished by the way. No faced bark 

 ever went down, amid the loneliness of ocean, under more 

 helpless circumstances, or amid surroundings more awful and 

 sublime. 



SPEED AND ENDURANCE. 



The camel unites in himself the two sterling qualities of 

 speed and endurance. It is incorrect to suppose that the drom- 



