The Camels
The secret of the camel’s unique value lies, as we all know, in the fact that these animals are so footed that they do not sink, as a hard-hoofed mammal sinks, into the sand. They walk on it as a reindeer walks on snow, upon a spreading, padded foot.
HOW THE CAMEL CAN MARCH FOR DAYS WITHOUT DRINKING
In addition to that, they can march for several days through the desert without drinking - though it is not true that a camel can support a huge burden through the wilds for two or three weeks at a time without any chance of drinking.
The camel is as fond of water as a thirsty human being, and it has no special way to store up the water. Like other animals water is stored in the tissues all over the body. A large amount of salt must be eaten to enable the camel to retain quantities of water without bad effects, but if plenty of salt is available a thirsty, shrunken camel will plump out amazingly.
It was once thought that the peculiar ‘cells” in the first two compartments of the camel’s stomach were used to store water, but the water contained in the stomach is not enough to do much good in the desert.
The hump, while not used to store water as such, is more important. It is almost all fat. When this fat is used up by the body, water is produced - as much as ten gallons in a large camel. In addition, the animal’s body draws upon that reservoir of fatty nourishment for the energy that it exhausts over its work and under privation.
THE ONE-HUMPED ARABIAN CAMEL IS WELL SUITED TO DESERT TRAVELING
There are two distinct species of domesticated camels in the Old World. One is the one-humped Arabian, covering a wide domain in northern and eastern Africa, Syria, Arabia and other parts of Asia Minor, and in northern India, Mongolia and south-central Asia. It is long-limbed with large spreading feet, soft for the desert sands. Callous pads, or cushions, upon its feet, and upon its chest, and on the joints of its legs protect these parts from being cut by the sharp grains of sand when the animal is walking, kneeling or lying down. Over its large dark eyes it has long eyelashes to protect it from the glaring sun and the whirling sands. Its nosrils, set slantwise above the split upper lip, can be closed also against drifting sand. That upper lip is very sensitive. Sight and smell are especially keen and the animal can tell at a great distance away where water is to be found. Its teeth are strong, just right for cropping the sparse plants of the esert. Its coat is shaggy, with a fringe of hair along the top of its neck and under its chin. The coat is colored like the sand. We know the shade as “camel’s hair.”
THE TWO-HUMPED CAMEL OF ASIA’S MOUNTAIN PASSES
The other species of domestic camel is the two-humped Bactrian camel of eastern Asia, similar to the Arabian but built more heavily, with longer, finer hair, which is dark-colored or fawn. Its feet are harder, for this camel lives, not in sandy deserts, but among the rocky wastes and mountain passes of northern and eastern Asia, in China, Siberia, Mongolia and India. It stands well the rigors of Arctic cold and of fierce heat.
No ‘wild species of camel has ever been found, but a two-humped variety is said to roam in Central Asia and Siberia. Even these animals may be only offspring of tame camels that escaped from man centuries ago. They may be runaways from dead civilization.
The long hair of the Bactrian camel is very valuable for making fine cloth. In spring the hair loosens and falls off in clumps. The hair is carefully gathered, cleaned and sorted. The fine undercoat makes the best cloth; the hairs are as fine as the finest Merino wool. Shawls of this material have been woven in central Asia for thousands of years; the best ones are nearly priceless. Nowadays camel’s-hair coats are its most common use.
THE DROMEDARY, A SWIFT CAMEL USED AS A RIDING STEED
You have heard the word dromedary. It is popularly taken to mean a one-humped camel. However, it has another, more special, meaning. Transportation camels are those which carry baggage and those trained for riding. The riding beasts are the dromedaries. They are chosen for their speed, and can go fifty to seventy-five or, occasionally, a hundred miles a day. The baggage camels are less fleet, but, going at fifteen to twenty- five miles a day, can carry five hundred to six hundred pounds. Camel caravans of 1000 animals or more are not unknown. The beasts proceed with a pacing motion, lifting the two left feet, then the two right feet, and so on. As you can imagine, the traveler must learn to ride, and at first it is not easy.
The camel’s bone is the finest thing nature has ever made for the frame of an animal. It is like ivory, dense and hard and splendid. In fact, camel bone is used in enormous quantities as a substitute for ivory. The shape of the blood corpuscles in the camels and their relatives, the llamas, is oval, like those of the birds and the reptiles, but unlike these, the camel’s red corpuscles have no nuclei. In all other mammals the blood corpuscles are circular.
We find another feature in the animal. Its temperature is not constant, like that of man and some other mammals. It rises with the surrounding heat, it falls with the drop of night’s fierce winds. We humans vary little more than a degree whether we are in the tropics or the Arctic; the camel’s temperature may rise and fall several degrees in the course of twenty-four hours. This is less change than in reptiles.
One would imagine that it must endure agonies in the noonday glare, for there is only one small patch behind the neck from which sweat glands pour out perspiration to relieve the heat of the animal’s body. However, when resting the camel actually prefers to kneel in the full glare of the sun rather than to seek shade. The rareness of sweat glands helps to conserve water.
The camel goes grumbling beneath its burden through a desert in heat. He always grumbles. He hates his master and everybody else; and many are the stories of camels trying to kill their drivers, and sometimes succeeding. Some camels are more morose and wicked than others, but they are never gentle or amiable. This is particularly true of the common burden-bearing camels. The swifter riding camel, the dromedary, is often better treated, and his disposition is not always so bad; but even he is not a gentle or affectionate beast.
There is not a moment of the day when a camel will not bite its master’s arm off if it has the chance. It can inflict one of the worst crunching nips possible by any pair of jaws. It will seize the hand that feeds it; it will take a piece out of a man’s back or leg; it will fasten upon a man who rides past it in a narrow mountain way and dash him down to death. It is possible that thousands of years of ill treatment have bred viciousness into it as fixedly as hardihood.
Even among themselves they fight dreadfully. Lacking horns, they use the teeth, and with these they seize a leg, and wrench and tug until they have thrown the rival, then they drop upon him with the knees, and pound him to death. A contest between two bull camels is a grim spectacle; and it is a dangerous one, for the example of the first two is infectious, and will set the other males roaring and battling among themselves with a fury not to be described, and a damage to merchandise not to be mentioned in the hearing of a native owner.
What would be rich abundance to a horse would not be acceptable to a camel. For him the lush grass of the meadow is not food; give him the prickly thorn, the scrubby thistle-like growth, and the camel paradise is there. One has seen a gaunt Arabian camel stride across a field ready for hay- making, and paddle through a brook, which camels abominate, to reach a hedge composed of forbidding briar and bramble, and feast with every sign of rapture.
The natural food of the animal is the ungenerous product of the desert. Where other animals would perish of starvation he waxes sleek and prosperous. The Bactrian luxuriates on bitter weeds and mineralized water, salt to the taste. It is marvelous to what ends such food can be turned. Had it been otherwise, had the camel required sustenance like that of deer and cow and antelope, human history would have been different.
We never could have crossed the deserts; the steppes would have been a barrier between Asia and Europe not to be passed. Solomon could not have built his temple at Jerusalem; the Phenicians could never have got their vares to the coasts; during the Middle Ages tea, spices, the silk and satin and gems of the East could never have come to Europe had not camels on poverty’s fare carried the burdens asked of them.
The camel serves in more ways than as a bearer of burdens. Milk from the females; flesh from the young and the old; ropes, tents, fine shawls and rugs and clothes from the hair—all these are derived from the animals. Hides and bones are also converted to human use. In time of war, a camel corps is more useful than horse cavalry in parts of Africa and India, and both British and French maintain camel units.
We shall need the camel for a long time. The desert parts of the world in which he is useful are not likely to have many railroads or motor roads soon, if indeed they are ever built, through some of the wastes. Airplane1;, to be sure, are being used in the East for long trips, but a camel can go where airplanes can not land. No other means of transportation seems likely to replace the camel soon.
Yet, for all his wondrous mastery of a melancholy, forbidding land, the camel is not a native of the place in which we find him. The story of his origin and wanderings matches all the romance of his latter- day career in domestication.
Though fossil camel forms suggest that the Arabian camel may have arisen in India, the camel tribes began in North America. Many types of camels were found in the \Vest, from the early beginnings until the coming of man.
THE FIRST CAMELS WERE ONLY ABOUT AS BIG AS FOXES
The first camels were about the size of a fox and had four toes on each foot, the side toes small and soon to disappear. From these long-extinct ancestors many kinds developed, some gazelle-like but others much larger than any still alive. The giraffe-camel was so called becnuse it had a long neck and long legs, like the giraffe, and these features enabled it to feed on the tops of the trees. just before men appeared on the scene, some of the camels went off into Asia while others wandered down the newly established bridge to South America. Then for some unknown reason the ones left behind in North America died out.
Fortunately those that picked their way along the untrodden mountains throve. They are there to this day. The South American llamas, alpacas and vicuñas are the only existing cousins of the camels.
First we have the wild vicufla, the smaller of two wild species. They are hillmen all. During the wet season of each year they keep to the higher ranges of the Cordilleras. They avoid sharp ridges and glaciers and feed in the meadows which these mountains clothe with a scanty herbage. With the coming of heat the mountain plants dry up. The vicufias then descend from the heights in search of food.
Soft-footed like the Arabian camel, they are extremely agile in the places they choose for life and liberty. Though the tribe is renowned less for sagacity than toughness, they have the wit to set sentinels to guard the feeding herds.
The guanacos are the larger, heavier species, massing in herds five hundred in number in the mountains, or reveling in the bleak discomfort of the plains of Patagonia. The llama which the ancient Peruvians domesticated was taken from the guanacos. The alpaca is the smallest, bred entirely for its woolly, hairy fleece. But the big tamed guanaco was indeed a wonder.
THE LLAMA, PACK HORSE OF THE ANCIENT PERUVIANS
For when Columbus reached America there was not a horse on all the vast twinned continent, and no animals had been tamed except the wolf, trained into a friendly dog, and, in South America, this useful beast, the llama.
The llama was the pack horse, the hackney and the beast of burden. The mysterious Peruvians had added several remarkable features to their fantastic civilization. They had learned how to grow corn, coffee, cotton and cocoa; their weaving and pottery and gold-working were of a very high order; and above all, they had captured and done with the llama what the ancient East had done with the camel. The male llamas did the work and supplied flesh food; the females were kept for their milk; and, as we have seen, the alpacas were the fleece-bearers.
THE CLEVER INCAS AND THEIR HERDS OF LLAMAS
The Incas had done as well in the breeding and perfecting of these animals for their several qualities as the old mystery men of the past had done, a thousand years before, in persuading sheep to grow flowing wool.
The alpaca’s long, fleecy coat makes finer, better wool than the llama wool. \Vool from the vicuña is the softest of all. Unfortunately it is becoming rare, and little of it reaches the market to-day.
The types that we know to-day were already fixed, high tribute to the skill of these early geniuses. It is thought that they themselves established the breed of guanaco, the one for weight-carrying and milk, the other cultivated for wool, as we have cultivated the jungle fowl for eggs. Llamas are still used to carry burdens.
Such is the story of the camel tribe. The camel has been taken about the world like cattle. It helped to carry up the wire which fenced in Australian farms from the devouring rabbit, and on the return journey it brought down wool to the ports. It toils in Zanzibar and has served in Italy; it is a valued servant in the Canaries and works for carrier and cultivator in many an odd corner of the world. Automobile and airplane have conquered the deserts, but the camels are useful still.
AN AMERICAN EXPERIMENT WITH CAMELS, WHICH FAILED
Just before the Civil War the United States Government attempted to use camels to carry supplies across the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. The war interrupted the experiment, and many of the animals escaped For years hunters and prospectors saw them in the wilds, but it is believed that they have entirely died out.
