hile some mahouts hint vaguely that the elephant came to India from the farther East, it is an accepted belief that the camel came from the West, i.e. from Arabia. No account is taken of the herds of wild camels seen on the high table-lands of Central Asia. So the saying has it, "The camel let loose, goes westward," or "The camel is a good Mussulman, for when free, he runs towards Mecca." In default of proof that the beast really follows the setting sun, it may be suspected that Oriental fancy, always strong, has more play than Oriental observation, which is often weak. For the camel is a peculiarly Muhammadan creature both in his life of to-day and in his wonderful origin. It was on his back that the body of Shah Ali Shah was laid after death, and he was sent into the wilderness till the Angel Gabriel met him and, taking the rope, led him no man knows whither. Before that ghostly funeral the camel resembled a horse, but the Angel gave him a hump like the mountain into which he disappeared, and feet to spread on the yielding sand, with other anatomical peculiarities, all duly enumerated by good Mussulmans. This story is also told of Moses, the friend of God, or the converser with God, the place of whose sepulchre no man knoweth unto this day. Probably the saying has its origin in the propensity of the stupid camel to stray and lose itself, for it has none of the "homing" faculty so strongly developed in the horse. People who religiously face westward several times a day to pray naturally get an occidental twist in their minds. Nay, there are those who maintain that all the world has this trick, and that, like Wordsworth's friends, we still go "stepping westward." South Australia has not yet discovered a Mecca twist in the thousands of camels it now owns.

The Prophet himself was a camel driver or SerwÁn, and always cherished the liking of a true Arab for the beast of which he said, "Speak ill neither of the camel nor of the wind; the camel is a benefit to man and the wind is an emanation of the Spirit of God." When he was married to Kadijah, two young camels were slain for the wedding feast.

But Indian popular observation lacks the Arab keenness, nor is the beast so important and highly thought of as in Arabia. There is no strong insight in calling the long shafts of the camel's limbs crooked, as in the angry saying to a shifty ne'er-do-well, "O camel, hast thou one straight bone in thy body?" The pride of a big man is rebuked by the saying, "The camel thought he was the biggest thing in the world till he came under the mountain." Of a very tall man who, in India, is often a simpleton, they say, "Tall as a camel, but silly as an ass," and of an unwilling, grumbling servant, "He snarls like a camel when you load him." The bite of a camel is very severe and sometimes poisonous, so the saying goes, "God preserve us from the nip of a camel and the snap of a dog." Of a notoriously unlucky man they say, "Even if he were perched on a camel a dog would jump up and bite him." The Kirgiz have a pious expansion of this saying: "Whom the fates bless with a good son may light a bonfire; but the father cursed with a bad son will be devoured by dogs, though he be mounted on the back of a camel." We express the completeness of ill-luck by saying, "The bread never falls but on its buttered side." The Kirgiz say, "One never falls but from a nÁr"—the large-sized Bokhariot camel. A common saying similar to our "waiting to see which way the cat jumps" is based on a trivial story. A potter and a greengrocer hired a camel between them. The camel reached round with his long neck and ate some of the cabbages on the greengrocer's side, whereupon the potter jeered. "Wait and see which side he sits down upon," said the greengrocer. The camel sat down on the potter's side and smashed his wares. Æsop's frog tried to swell himself as big as the ox, but in India they say of pretentious little people, "When the camels were branded, the frog also held up his leg," as who should say, "brand me too." "The goat-keeper went to buy a camel and wanted to feel its ears" (a point of handling which no judicious goat-buyer omits) is a saying which has several applications in India; but in Britain also we may see critics a-tiptoe, reaching up with tiny and inapt canons of judgment to things they do not understand.

The decorative value of the camel cannot be appreciated by those who have only seen one or two at a time. He was made for a sequence, as beads are made for stringing. On an Indian horizon a long drove of camels, tied head to tail, adorns the landscape with a festooned frieze of wonderful symmetry and picturesqueness. Five hundred camels go to a mile.[3] If I had a very long and lofty hall to decorate I should pray the architect to let me loop it round with camels, with here and there a Biloch driver, as the frieze turned a corner or was interrupted by a bracket or girder. For a quaint and almost comic spectacle, a bivouac of a camel Kafila or caravan on the march is not easily surpassed. The beasts are seated four or five on each side of a sheet or table-cloth on which their fodder is placed. Camels are as symmetrically constructed as gun-carriages, and their hind-legs fold up like two-foot-rules. They rest in great part on a pedestal behind the chest with which Nature has furnished them, and sit close together in high-elbowed state with an indescribable air of primness and propriety. With, as often happens, a driver supping at each end of this table in the wilderness, the whole arrangement has an absurdly formal and well-regulated air, suggesting a tea-party of elderly maiden ladies, as the long necks curve and bridle and the mincing mouths move busily.

The deliberate movement of the beasts under their burdens is impressive and not without a touch of scornful majesty. Only an Oriental, one would think, could accommodate himself to that unhasting cadence of step. Perhaps the reported existence of wild camels in Arizona territory is a fabulous or jocular illustration of American character. It is said they were imported into the United States to serve as pack animals, but nobody foresaw that the nervous, electric American was the last man alive to pace placidly at the end of a camel's nose-rope. He naturally dropped it in disgust;—and now there are wild camels in Arizona. If this story is not true, it ought to be.

The truth about the camel's character has often been debated. He is wonderful, and, in his own way, beautiful to look at, and his patience, strength, speed, and endurance are beyond all praise. The camel-riders of Rajputana and Central India, mounted on animals of a swift breed, cover almost incredible distances at high speed, finding it necessary to protect themselves against the racking motion by broad leathern belts tightly buckled, which are often covered with velvet and prettily broidered in silk. Even they, who know the beast at his best, never pretend to like their mounts, as one likes a horse. So useful a beast is estimable, but the most indulgent observation fails to find a ground for affection. Europeans, at all events, who have to do with camels seem to think it were as easy to lavish one's love on a luggage van. He is a morose, discontented, grumbling brute, a servant of man, it is true, as is the water that turns a mill-wheel, the fire that boils a kettle, or the steam that stirs the piston of a cylinder. He does not come to a call like other beasts, but has to be fetched and driven from browsing. There are but few words made for his private ear such as belong to horses, dogs, and oxen. An elephant has a separate word of command for sitting down with front legs, with hind legs, or with all together, and he moves at a word. A camel has but one, and that must be underlined with a tug at his nose-rope ere he will stoop. But he has a large share in that great public property of curses whose loss would enrich the world.

The camel has so little sense, one wonders he is credited with malevolence, but so it is, and there is sound appreciation of his vindictiveness in a phrase in use for bearing malice, equivalent to "camel-tempered," and of his aimless wandering in another addressed to an idle man, "Why are you loafing round like a loose camel?"

"Camel colour" is a common word among weavers, embroiderers, and the like; but it is not a good colour name, because camels vary much in tint. Other names of this end of the colour scale are better, as "badÁmi" or almond; "mouse colour"; khÂki, or khara, catechu tinted. An ostrich is a camel-bird, and so says Western science,—struthio camelus,—and a giraffe a camel-cow; no notice apparently being taken of the creature's spots.

The camel's grumble has led the British soldier to christen him "a humming-bird." "Commissariat scent-bottle" has also been heard, and when in camp with camels, you see more in these schoolboy absurdities than would strike a stranger. The relations of the British soldier with the camel, however, have been so vividly and truly put in my son's barrack-room ballad, "Oonts!" (camels), that I make no apology for quoting it at length,—premising that Mr. Thomas Atkins, who takes his own way with Oriental languages, invariably shortens long vowels, and makes oont rhyme with grunt.

OONTS!

(NORTHERN INDIA TRANSPORT TRAIN)

Through the humorous lilt of these lines you may perceive many facts, especially the mortality among camels in our Afghan campaigns. In that of 1878-1879, about 50,000 camels were paid for by the British Government. But this was in no wise the fault of the brutal Briton, for the beasts were deliberately sacrificed by their native owners, who were guaranteed compensation for their loss. It was easier to allow the camel to die than to toil after him over a difficult country. It is now laid down as an axiom of the Transport service that animals required to proceed beyond the bases, and to act with troops in the field, should be the property of the Government, while the transport of supplies within the bases should be mainly hired. But on the next pinch the chances are that the axiom will be disregarded. A history of the military services of the camel would be the history of Eastern wars. He has served and served well both as baggage cart and troop-horse, and whether from stupidity or courage is as stolid and unmoved under attack as were the British infantry squares at Waterloo. Herodotus, Pliny, Livy, Diodorus, and Xenophon are quoted by Major Burn of the Intelligence Branch in his excellent official manual on Transport and Camel Corps. In modern campaigns camel corps were organised by Napoleon in Egypt, Sir Charles Napier in Sindh, by Carbuccia in Algeria, and during the Indian Mutiny the "Ninety-twa" Highlanders had a camel corps of 150 native drivers, and 155 well-bred camels on which sat 150 kilted Highlanders. Sir Charles Napier's Sindh camel corps seems to have been the most complete in design and equipment, and in every way worthy of that great soldier's genius. The principle on which it was based is the plainest of all the plain truths ignored by our system—that the transport is the most vital part of military matters, and should be organised with just as much care as a regiment. In an expedition for the capture of a robber chief in Sindh, Sir Charles Napier's camel corps travelled 70 miles during the night, captured the thief, and returned, thus accomplishing 140 miles in twenty-four hours. Feats of this kind, of course, were not continuous, and their bringing-off was due to the care with which the rest and upkeep of the animals were maintained. This splendid property organised in 1845 was allowed to die down, and no such efficient organisation existed in subsequent campaigns, where money, hastily spilled like water, purchased discomfort and sickness for the troops, and that tardy and confused movement of his masses which breaks the heart of an anxious general.

As a rule, the management of camels should be left to Orientals, though the French say their men learned to imitate the Arab camel cries. Our Thomas Atkins is a poor ventriloquist, ill at outland tongues. Like his officers, too, he cherishes the ancient illusion, filtered down from book to book, about the extra water-tank stomach of the camel, and his power of going without water. As a plain physiological fact, the camel has no such chamber, his digestive arrangements are like those of the ox, but simpler, approaching the horse character; and, if he goes without water, it is only because he cannot get it. There are pouches in his stomach, which frequently after death are found to contain fluid; but that they are reservoirs pure and simple is doubtful, says Mr. J. H. Steel in his Manual of the Camel. "It is very certain that the parched traveller who cuts open his dying camel to obtain its water store will thus procure only a very little fluid of a temperature of about 90° Fahr., of a mawkish, sub-acid flavour and an unpleasant odour." He should be watered twice a day in the hot weather, and once in the cool season. It is true, of course, that he has been known to go dry for seven or eight days, but it was labour and sorrow to him. Also, although he can travel twenty miles a day, carrying 360 lbs. weight, he is capable of fatigue as other beasts are, and once out of condition does not regain his strength in less than six months. And in spite of his unfriendly and unsympathetic disposition, it is a fact that, like the rest of God's creatures, he is more tractable under kind treatment that when bullied and roughly handled. Of a man we sometimes say "he has an unfortunate manner," nor do we always mean it, for such a manner often shows the aggressive selfishness and ill-temper that command fortune and respect. The supercilious expression framed in the camel's lips, which disclose with savage threat the long upper teeth, denied by nature to other ruminants, and his curiously indifferent air, are real misfortunes to him. We bow respectfully to the camel-tempered man of private life, but it is hard to be civil to a beast whose face is a sculptured sneer.

The long-shanked, cushion-footed creature is especially good at fording rivers where the bottom is sandy. A drove going across will sometimes make a ford practicable for horses, acting like a roller on a loose road, but a few yards of greasy clay will throw many a camel. A fair slope is not much of an obstacle, but a steep hill of slippery wet clay, up which a mule goes gaily, is a sad business for the camel. Nature has made his shoulder, chest, and fore-legs strong, but the attachments of the hind limbs are weak and ill-considered. So the beast is liable to dislocations of the hip in climbing, or, as the British soldier says, "he splits 'isself up." Some Afghan short-legged breeds are good climbers, but of most the Arab saying holds good: "Which is best for you, O camel, to go up hill or down? May God's curse rest on both wherever met, quoth the camel." None the less, at this moment long strings are pacing with heavy burdens up and down the hill roads to Kashmir, Simla, and KÁbul.

Camels, like mules, can be used to carry field-pieces, the equipment of a gun being divided among three animals. The indigenous practice was to make the beast himself a gun-carriage, bearing a Zamburah (wasp), a piece like our old falconet or like the heavy swivel muskets sometimes seen in English armouries, intended for the tops of a ship or the stern sheets of a boat. The saddle also carries a rider who holds the heavy wooden stock and fires the gun with a slow match. The lingering nature of this arrangement must in action have lent a lively interest to the evolutions of a gun camel, for there is always the chance that just at the critical moment the beast may sling round and point the gun at its friends. Another camel gun is a sort of mitrailleuse, carrying twenty-one barrels in a framework of iron-clamped wood. Both these contrivances are still in as much use as the brooding pax Britannica allows in Rajputana, especially at Oodeypore and Jeypore, and make a great figure in State processions when salutes are fired. The Sikhs had a great number of camel guns of the Zamburah type, and at the battle of Sobraon it is said that over 2000 were captured. Some of these still survive in the armoury at Fort Lahore.

Besides his services as a slow-pacing pack animal and as a steed capable of covering long distances at a high speed, the camel has many uses unnoticed by Europeans. He is blindfolded in Sindh and made to go a mill-round, grinding flour or oil seeds; working sometimes in such a confined space, one wonders how they got the huge beast in, or how they will get him out again. He takes the place of the ox at the plough and the well, and acts as water-carrier in parts of Rajputana, on the edges of the Indian desert and in the camel districts of the Punjab. On the Grand Trunk road to Delhi are wonderful double-storied wagons drawn by camels. These old-world contrivances go at the rate of about three miles per hour, and are like nothing so much as the cage wagons of travelling menageries. They are in effect iron cages intended originally as a protection against robbery. The passengers are huddled together and seem to sleep most of the time, and, to do him justice, so does the driver. The most picturesque "property" of the Punjab Government house is a huge char À banc, to which is harnessed a team of four or six fine camels with leopard skin housings and gaily attired riders. The camel van will probably be run off the road by the railway, but modified versions of it must for long survive in the desert regions off the line of rail.

It ought to be unnecessary to say that while one camel is like another to an untrained European eye, there are in India, as in Arabia, carefully classified breeds, though they are not distinctively branded with caste marks, as is the case in the West. One listens to this lore with respect, but it is not easily remembered, nor is it of much importance, save to the camel owner or the Government officer sent forth at tuck of drum to buy or hire all the good camels he can lay hands on. By common consent the very best of the animals of the plain are considered to be those of Bikanir and Jessulmir, Rajput States on the edge of the great Indian desert, where the hot dry air suits the austere Arab constitution of the beast. But it has a wider range of variety than is generally thought, each suited to its habitat, until in the hills the slender, high-caste form becomes square, sturdy, and thickly covered with a coarse, cold-resisting pelage. The two-humped Bactrian camel is prepared by nature to withstand a cold almost as keen and piercing as that the reindeer feels, and yet will breed with the one-humped camel of the burning plain. Signor Lombardini, an authority on cameline anatomy, finds a rudimentary second hump in the ordinary one-humped camel.

After the he-goat, a whole camel seems a large offering for the most pious person to make, but he still occasionally serves as a sacrifice. Colonel Tod wrote that the Great Mogul used to slay a camel with his own hand on the new year festival, and the flesh was eaten by the court favourites. He is certainly eaten, and they say camel in good condition much resembles beef. After his death his bones are valuable, being whiter and more dense than most other bones, and a fair substitute for ivory. But they are neglected except by the lac-turners of Dera Ismail Khan, who use them for the studs and ornaments with which they adorn their ware. Possibly some camel bones are picked by English turners and button-makers out of the Indian bones now imported. It may not be generally known that the attention of traders has been recently drawn to the cattle remains that lie near Indian villages. Each hamlet has its Golgotha, where worn-out animals are left to die. Hitherto, only the vulture, the crow, and the jackal have visited these spots, after the leather-dresser has taken the skin of the last comer. But though it never occurred to the Oriental that they could be of any use, Western science, like the giant in the child's tale, grinds bones to make bread. So the village bone-heaps are swept up and shipped to Europe. Perhaps a day may come when the people, awaking to their value, will cry out that they have been robbed. The bone heaps will certainly be missed by the scientific Indian agriculturists of the future, but there is no way of keeping them in the country. Learned authorities on economic questions say it is a mistake to use customs duties with any beneficent intention, just as literary critics say it is bad art to write a story with a purpose, and both have some right on their side. Otherwise, in the interests of India, one would like to impose a heavy export duty on wild bird skins, feathers, and bones, and a crushing import duty on aniline dyes and Members of Parliament.

Camel trappings are not so gaudy in India as in Egypt or Morocco, where riding animals are bedizened in scarlet and yellow. They are in a different key of colour, belonging to a school of pastoral ornament in soberly-coloured wools, beads, and small white shells, which appears to begin (or end) in the Balkans and stretches eastward through Central Asia into India, especially among the Biloch and other camel folk on our North-West frontier. Camel housings may be the beginning of the nomad industry of carpet weaving. It is perhaps not too fanciful to trace on the worsted neckband the original unit or starting-point of the carpets and "saddle-bags" which have given lessons to English upholsterers. There is not much room for variety in a narrow fillet with only black, brown, and dingy white as a colour scheme, but you may watch a long Kafila go curtseying past and find no two neck-bands quite alike in the arrangement of zig-zags, diamonds, bars, and squares. These bands, with more richly coloured rugs and saddle-bags, and the homely russet splendours of worsted cords, tassels, shells, and beads, with which the leading camel is adorned, are wrought by women. Like more women's work, it is done at intervals. The English lady complains that her Turkoman or Biloch rug lies unevenly on her parquet floor, and does not reflect that the perverse "buckling" marks the times when camp was shifted to follow the pasturing flocks, and the loom with its unfinished carpet was rolled up to be staked anew with Oriental carelessness as to straightness. "Saddle-bags," said a London tradesman to me, "have had their day, they've got common." This sounded sadly, but they will not cease to be for all that.