The expression of his soft, heavy, dreamy eye tells its own tale of meek submission and patient endurance ever since travelling began in the deserts. The camel appears to be wholly passive—without doubt or fear, emotions or opinions of any kind—to be in all things a willing slave to destiny. He has none of the dash and brilliancy of the horse; that looking about with erect neck, fiery eye, cocked ears, and inflated nostrils; that readiness to dash along a race-course, follow the hounds across country, or charge the enemy; none of that decision of will and self-conscious pride which demand, as a right, to be stroked, patted, pampered, by lords and ladies.

The poor camel bends his neck, and with a halter round his long nose, and several hundred-weight on his back, paces patiently along from the Nile to the Euphrates. Where on earth, or rather on sea, can we find a ship so adapted for such a voyage as his over those boundless oceans of desert sand? Is the camel thirsty—he has recourse to his gutta percha cistern, which holds as much water as will last a week, or, as some say, ten days even, if necessary. Is he hungry—give him a few handfuls of dried beans; it is enough; chopped straw is a luxury. He will gladly crunch with his sharp grinders the prickly thorns and shrubs in his path, to which hard Scotch thistles are as soft down. And when all fails, the poor fellow will absorb his own fat hump. If the land-storm blows with furnace heat, he will close his small nostrils, pack up his ears, and then his long defleshed legs will stride after his swan-like neck through suffocating dust; and having done his duty, he will mumble his guttural, and leave, perhaps, his bleached skeleton to be a landmark in the waste for the guidance of future travellers.