I 



14 THE USES OF THE CAMEL. 



continues, " witnessed in Arabia Petrea an instance of complete 

 privation for four days, in very hot weather and with dry 

 fodder." Major Skinner declares that the camels of his caravan 

 did not drink between Damascus and the Euphrates (from the 

 3d to 23d of April), though water was offered to them on the 

 tenth day of his journey. Tavernier's camels, on one occasion, 

 were nine days without water, and Russell mentions a case of 

 abstinence for fifteen days. A neighbor of mine in Salem, 

 Massachusetts, Colonel Miller, formerly collector of the port, 

 kept a camel in his stables for a winter, which passed a con- 

 tinuous period of six weeks without drinking. The camels 

 that I brought from Africa the past season did not taste water 

 from the time of their shipment at Algiers until they were 

 landed from the railroad cars at Havre. I led them to a trough 

 at the station of the Mediterranean road in Paris, but they 

 merely snuffed up its cool fragrance for a moment, and then, at 

 the w^ord of command, stepped gayly off across the boulevards. 

 Neither did they drink at all during their voyage across the 

 Atlantic to E'ew York, embracing a period of twelve days. 

 " Ships of the land," in sooth ! The gallant old steamship 

 " New York" was not more independent of the Croton and the 

 water-tanks of Southampton than were my stanch clippers, 

 Biskra" and " Luled." 



SHIPS OF THE DESERT. 



There be some hair-splitters who have objected to this time- 

 honored appellation of " ships of the desert," contending that 

 the simile would not be likely to occur to the Arabs, who are 

 not navigators, and averring that the word which we translate 

 " ship" means simply wagon or vehicle. However this may be, 

 there is a peculiar fitness in the simile of the ship, as many of 

 us who have experienced feelings similar to sea-sickness on 

 riding for the first time a camel-back might perchance unwil- 

 lingly admit. The camel, as we have seen, before setting out 

 on a journey, provisions himself for a voyage; and even as a 

 ship, guided by human intelligence, finds its way over the 

 watery waste, so does he, with unerring instinct, lay his course 

 direct from oasis to oasis, finding a path where all is pathless 

 across the broad-lying sands of the desert. To see a caravan 

 going out of the city gates laden with precious freight, the 



