Τ HROUGH a sweep of saffron sky the glowing sun spilled an aureola of golden light over the heat-swept sand of the northern Sahara. Before me, as I rode, the sand ripples were broken only by big heart-shaped footprints of a solitary camel-then beyond the rounding sand hillocks the great beast silhouetted his gaunt shape against the afterglow, dignified, patient, defiant, imperturbable, a creature of the vast wastes; revered, valued, and ill treated by the Oriental, misunderstood and surrounded in mystery by the Occidental; to me an epitome of the deserts and their inhabitants. Down through the countless ages the silent, cushioned tread of the camel has kept pace with the peoples of the East, and for æons, so far as history or Arab tradition is concerned, he has furnished these nomads with food, shelter, clothing, and transportation, has printed his way across the trackless deserts and left his bones white-bleached beside the sandblown trails, guidons for future garflas (caravans). With the advent of human history comes the camel as a domesticated animal. Before the genesiacal scribe had closed his book, we find camels a main apportionment to the children of men, and even to-day the Arab's wealth is counted in camels. The far-off sunken districts of Turkestan in Central Asia is attributed as his original habitation over which he roamed in uncontrolled freedom. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds. of camels-the double-humped Bactrian and the single-humped Arabian. The Bactrian threads its way over Asia east of the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, clear across to China and as far as the colder mountainous regions of northern Mongolia; the Arabian picks his trail westward across the heat-soaked rocks and sand reaches of the Arabian and African deserts. I had often met the great, lumbering jemal (camel) in the narrow streets and open suks (markets) of many North African towns, but it was not until I had eaten in his shadow, slept by him in fonduks, and traveled with him day by day along the caravan trails of the northern Sahara, that I began to understand and fully to appreciate this incongruous model of ugly usefulness. Not long after my arrival in Tripoli, the gateway of the desert and the focus to the great trans-Saharan caravan routes which stretch away south, I took with me a hybrid native of Sudanese and Arab stock named Bringali (Fishing Line), and together we journeyed to a fonduk on the edge of the town. "O camel driver !" spoke Bringali, as he addressed a muffled figure squatting in the shadow of the wall, "have you two good camels?" "To thy eye, O merchant" (judge for thyself), replied Mahmood, the driver, as, unrolling himself out of his baracan, he led the way across the fonduk to where two heavily built draft camels lazily chewed their cuds, and with their short, tufted tails flicked the flies from their rumps. One was a moth-eaten-looking beast, for it was molting time, and the owner plucked here and there a handful of the soft hair from its shaggy hide. The other was closely sheared, as is customary when the hottest weather approaches. After some bartering I hired them and the driver for the afternoon for sixty cents. They were draft camels, " baggagers," as Tommy Atkins calls them down in Egypt. The Arab calls them just plain "jemals." While there are many different breeds of camels, the most distinctive of the Arabians are the heavy, slow-moving jemal, and his cousin, the mehari, a tall, lightly built, swifter, and more elegant creature, used almost exclusively for riding, known as the riding or running camel. Much confusion has existed as to the word dromedary, which many have considered a distinction between the Arabian and Bactrian camels; i. e., the one and two humped. Dromedary is not a distinction of species, however, but of breed. The name, although generally applied to the finely bred Arabian, may be applied to an equivalent breed of Bactrian. The word dromedary itself is undoubtedly, in root at least, derived from the Greek dromas (running), finding its suffix, perhaps, from the Arabic word mahari, the name of a swift breed of camel raised by the tribe of Mahra. This name was given by the Greeks, about the time of Cyrus or Xerxes, to certain breeds of swift camels. One has but to try the experiment of riding a baggager to realize that there is not only a distinction with a difference, but a distinction with a vengeance; and any Christian who willingly substitutes the rump of a jemal for terra-firma deserves all he gets, for even an Arab will prefer walking, to the lumbar vertebræ of a jemal. My intention was to ride three or four miles into the desert and back. "Mount, Arfi" (master), said Bringali, and I straddled a straw-filled sack thrown across the hind quarters of the recumbent jemal, who uttered a fearful protest the whole length of his long throat, turned his head square round and looked me full in the face, twitching his mobile upper lip with a half-cynical, half-deprecating curl. The Arabs ride back of the pack-saddle for easier motion, and often to be out of reach of the jaws of a biter. "Up, thou tick of an ass's tailar-r-rah !" and with a vicious whack the Arab brought his heavy stick across the beast's jaw. I lurched forward, back, then forward again; with a final remonstrating grunt, Jemal straightened out his numerous joints and was on his feet. We were soon following between mud walls and palm trees of the oasis of Tripoli to the desert. Hike! hike !" yelled Mahmood, whereupon the brute broke into a lumbering, racking jog. The camel's natural gait, both in walking and running, is said to be a pace, but so far as I was concerned it might have been a centrifugal back-action trying to describe an eccentric rotary motion two ways at once on cobblestones. “Adda—adda !" (turn to one side) shrieked the Arab, just in time to save me from collision with a hedge of prickly cactus. The camel, with head and tail outstretched almost horizontally, was now fairly under way. The cushion had slewed to one side, and I gathered my knees up under me and clung desperately to my only support, the tree of the pack-saddle, in order to avoid slipping down the inclined plane of his rump. Set a section of a North Carolina twelve-rail fence at an angle of forty-five degrees in a farm wagon, straddle this, and have the whole outfit, yourself included, run away with over a rocky New England blueberry pasture, and you will form a mild conception of the sensation of riding a baggager. "Hot! hot!" (slower) bellowed Mahmood, puffing along in the distance. "Praise be to Allah !" the jemal obeyed. "Sh, sh!" (whoa) gurgled the perspiring Mahmood. The place where I lit was soft sand. Often in the twilight of early mornings, shortly after the muezzin's call, from the minaret of the neighboring Djema-el-Daruj (Mosque of the Steps), I would wind my way with soft-scuffing Arabs through the narrow byways of Tripoli to the great sand reach of the Suk-el-Thalat (Tuesday market) beyond the town walls. In the obscure light, shacks, muffled figures, heaps of produce, and camels humped themselves over the sand-stretch like the promontories of a miniature mountain range, and the feath ered palms of the oasis to the east were traced in violet against the forthcoming rose of early dawn. Then the sun rose over them and painted out the dim monotone of things in strong contrasts of lights and shades. the suk might well appear a camel market, but go to that section beyond the esparto jetty, bordering the coast road, which leads to Sciara-el-Sciut and Tajura. Here you find a living, dun-colored sea of camels; old and young, male and female, pure breeds and hybrids, well conditioned and ill seasoned, ranging in color from the rare black camel through the various values of dun colors and browns to snow white. This is the camel market. Far back in the Jebel (mountains) and plateau lands of the desert the various Arab and Berber tribes breed and raise large herds of camels, pasturing them on the wild esparto grass, mimosa bushes, and the dry camel thorn of the desert, from all of which the camel derives nutriment, remarkable to me until I once saw a camel devour with relish a piece of dry wood. The principal Tripoli camelraisers are the tribes of Jebel, Sert, Zintan, Orfella, and Weled-Bu-Sef, who, with the small owners, have, it is estimated, brought the total number of camels to four hundred thousand, or one camel to every one and a quarter square miles of the vilayet of Tripoli. From these far-off arid breeding-grounds I have passed on the trail herds of camels traveling south towards Murzuk, the far-off capital of the Fezzan, there to be sold to fill up the gaps in the ranks of the trans-Saharan caravans, or other herds being driven north toward the great coast trade centers, Bengazi and Tripoli, where, in the jemal suk of Tripoli, they fetch, generally, from ten to thirty dollars per head. Everywhere was the jemal; late arrivals, heavily loaded, carefully threaded their way along; others, relieved of their loads, stood singly or in small groups, or lay resting on the sand, often acquiring most inconceivable and distorted positions, bearing out the remark of a Tripoli friend that the camel was a combination of serpent and lamp-post." With every group of camels was at least one caravaneer left to guard them, and he was usually found seated by the guns of his comrades, chatting perhaps with neighboring caravan men. His camels were hobbled by short ropes tied under the fetlock of the forelegs, or, in the case of the more obstreperous, a foreleg was doubled up, and in this position securely lashed. Now and then the caravaneer rose leisurely and tossed into the center of the caravan (for the camels are usually facing one another in a ring) some green fodder-bishna (millet) or shtell (guinea corn cut green), or other herbage with which they are usually fed in the suks and oases. To the stranger the greater portion of woolly hair to the top of its hump, seven But follow yonder thick-set merchant, he with the scarlet haik and six fezzes under his tightly wound gold-embroidered turban. He is in search of an exceptional, full-grown, male draft camel; one with a weight of close on to twelve hundred pounds, which can stand the strain and carry his goods safely the six to eleven months across the deserts to the Sudan. At last he stops before a superb-looking beast. The top of its great shoulder is on a level with the Tripoline's turban; he examines the mouth, tail, feet, and skin, and runs his henna-stained fingers through the long |