Читать книгу Those Other Animals - G. A. Henty - Страница 5

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DURING the countless ages that must have elapsed in its upward progress from the original germ, by the various processes of the survival of the fittest, selection, and adaptability to circumstances, it is clear that the camel kept its eyes strictly to business. The object of the germ and its descendants was to build up an animal that should be capable of enjoying existence in the desert. To this they turned all their attention, with, it may be admitted, marvellous success; but it must be added that, while so doing, they unaccountably neglected the beautiful, and turned out a creature which in point of awkwardness and uncouthness stands completely apart from the rest of the brute creation. The camel’s wide, spongy feet save it from sinking in the sand, its long neck enables it either to allay irritation by gnawing itself down its spine to the root of its tail, or to grab a rider by the foot, while its hind legs are specially adapted by their length to allow it to scratch itself behind the ear. It may be admitted that in these respects few animals have its advantages. As a provision against sand storms it has the unique faculty of being able entirely to close its nostrils; while by complicated internal arrangements it is able to carry its water supply about with it for some days. Probably the camel did not foresee that, while thus little by little perfecting itself for a life in the desert, it was constructing an animal that would be exceedingly useful to man, and was preparing for itself and its descendants a lifelong servitude; but so it has been. The camel was one of the very first animals that man turned to his use. Jacob possessed camels, and Joseph was carried away into Egypt by a caravan of Ishmaelites with laden camels. Job possessed three thousand camels at the beginning of his misfortunes, and was promised six thousand at the end. The camel has, in fact, from the first been made a servant by man; it is only in Central Asia that it is known to exist in a wild state, and it is far more probable that these wild camels are the descendants of some escaped from captivity, than that they should all along have retained their freedom.

The camel is capable of great and prolonged endurance if not overloaded or overdriven; but it is a mistake to suppose that there are no limits to its powers in this way. The authorities of the Nile Expedition fell into this error, with the result that in three weeks after its start from Korti, the four thousand camels collected and brought up at so great an expense were all practically hors-de-combat, more than half being dead and the rest reduced to the last stage of misery and weakness. The camel on this occasion showed its usual obstinacy, and insisted on dying as a protest against being obliged to travel night and day with utterly insufficient quantities of food and water. A similar result followed the confidence of the authorities of the Abyssinian Expedition in the power of the camel to exist without water when dumped down by thousands on the bare sands of Annesley Bay. The failure of the camel upon these occasions must not, however, be imputed to it as blame. In its progress from the germ it had anticipated only the conditions under which it would naturally find itself, and had made no allowance for the stupidity of man.

It is not surprising that the camel, finding itself from the first reduced to slavery and converted into a beast of burden, should have developed a bad temper. No epithet was ever more ridiculously misapplied than that of patience in connection with the camel. It is, in fact, only possible to account for its use upon the ground that when first applied the word bore its strict Latin signification, and that it was the “suffering” and not the “long-suffering” signification of the word that renders it applicable. The life of the camel is spent in one long protest against its lot. It grumbles and growls alike when it is laden and unladen, when it is ordered to rise or to kneel; to stop or to go on; it roars threateningly at any animal that approaches it, and is ready at all times to take a piece out of any one who may place himself incautiously within reach of its teeth, and even when lying down will shoot out its hind leg with wonderful activity and viciousness to a distance of some two or three yards at a passer-by. The camel has literally no pleasures; its life is one unbroken round of toil, and it would seem almost that it has cultivated ill-temper until it has become a form of enjoyment. Even the camel’s walk is evidently the result of deep calculation, for it is of all kinds of gait the most unpleasant for its rider. The camel has its regular pace,—it will walk two miles and three-quarters an hour, neither faster nor slower,—and however urgent the need of haste may be to its owner, neither blows nor execrations will induce the camel to quicken its pace except for a few hundred yards, at the end of which it will settle down into its regulation stride, with doubtless much inward chuckling at its rider’s exasperation. It would not be fair to blame the camel for this; its disposition has been embittered, and it is not unreasonable that it should find an alleviation in the only way open to it. Indeed, man has much reason to be grateful that the obstinacy of the camel does not take the form of refusing from the first to live, rejecting sustenance, and persisting in giving the whole thing up as soon as its eyes are open to the lot awaiting it.

There are breeds of camels that differ materially from the ordinary specimen in point of speed. The Heirie or Maherry, and the Sabaye, are very swift, and will keep up a trot of eight or nine miles an hour for many hours together, and have been known to perform a journey of thirty-five days’ caravan travelling in five days, doing six hundred and thirty miles; while Purchas says that camels will carry messages from Timbuktu to places nine hundred miles distant in less than eight days. These fast camels have but one hump; but this is also the case with some of the beasts of burden. The object of these humps is not very clear, but it is supposed that as the stomachs are a reservoir of water, so the humps are natural portmanteaus in which the animals convey a reserve of sustenance to draw upon in case of need. It is, at any rate, certain that the fatty substance composing the humps considerably diminishes and dwindles when the animal is overworked.

The camel has courage as well as endurance: it goes on at its regular pace like a clock that is wound up, until it stops suddenly and falls; when it once does so, nothing can induce it to endeavour to use its feet again as long as man is present, although after the departure of the caravan it has been known to get up to browse on the bushes, and to find its way back to the wells from which it started in the morning. It is very insensible to pain. Count Gleichen, in his account of the Camel Corps in the Nile Expedition, gives many instances of this; notably the case of one camel which, having had its lower jaw shot off by a ball from an Arab matchlock, yet continued its journey to the end of the day in apparent unconsciousness that anything unusual had taken place. The one form of enjoyment of the camel is that dear also to the donkey and horse—namely, a roll in the sand. This appears to afford it great comfort and consolation, and after an indulgence in it, it is ready, when again loaded, to start with renewed vigour. The Heirie, being better treated and cared for than the ordinary camel, is naturally a very much better tempered beast than his humble congener, and is even capable of exhibiting an affection for his master. This is in itself a proof that the moroseness of disposition so general in the race is due to the treatment they receive from man, and not from any inherent incapacity to see things on their bright side; and the thoughtful should pity rather than blame camels for using their only available means of exhibiting their disgust and discontentment with their hard and joyless lot.