He Replied That The Turks Would Never
Trade Fairly; That They Were Extremely Bad People, And That They Would
Not Purchase Ivory In Any Other Way Than By Bartering Cattle, Which They
Stole From One Tribe To Sell To Another.
Our conversation was suddenly terminated by one of my men running in to
the tent with the bad news that one of the camels had dropped down and
was dying.
The report was too true. He was poisoned by a well-known
plant that he had been caught in the act of eating. In a few hours he
died. There is no more stupid animal than the camel. Nature has
implanted in most animals an instinctive knowledge of the plants
suitable for food, and they generally avoid those that are poisonous:
but the camel will eat indiscriminately anything that is green; and if
in a country where the plant exists that is well known by the Arabs as
the "camel poison," watchers must always accompany the animals while
grazing. The most fatal plant is a creeper, very succulent, and so
beautifully green that its dense foliage is most attractive to the
stupid victim. The stomach of the camel is very subject to inflammation,
which is rapidly fatal. I have frequently seen them, after several days
of sharp desert marching, arrive in good pasture, and die, within a few
hours, of inflammation caused by repletion. It is extraordinary how they
can exist upon the driest and apparently most innutritious food. When
other animals are starving, the camel manages to pick up a subsistence,
eating the ends of barren, leafless twigs, the dried sticks of certain
shrubs, and the tough dry paper-like substance of the dome palm, about
as succulent a breakfast as would be a green umbrella and a Times
newspaper. With intense greediness the camel, although a hermit in
simplicity of fare in hard times, feeds voraciously when in abundant
pasture, always seeking the greenest shrubs. The poison-bush becomes a
fatal bait.
The camel is by no means well understood in Europe. Far from being the
docile and patient animal generally described, it is quite the reverse,
and the males are frequently dangerous. They are exceedingly perverse;
and are, as before described, excessively stupid. For the great deserts
they are wonderfully adapted, and without them it would be impossible to
cross certain tracts of country for want of water.
Exaggerated accounts have been written respecting the length of time
that a camel can travel without drinking. The period that the animal can
subsist without suffering from thirst depends entirely upon the season
and the quality of food. Precisely as in Europe sheep require but little
water when fed upon turnips, so does the camel exist almost without
drinking during the rainy season when pastured upon succulent and dewy
herbage. During the hottest season, when green herbage ceases to exist
in the countries inhabited by camels, they are led to water every
alternate day, thus they are supposed to drink once in forty-eight
hours; but when upon the march across deserts, where no water exists,
they are expected to carry a load of from five to six hundred pounds,
and to march twenty-five miles per day, for three days, without
drinking, but to be watered on the fourth day.
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