Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/128

110 number of knots an hour which it can make; while as to picturing to the imagination the appearance of a fully "extended" camel, the feat may be simply pronounced impossible. The finish in this race was magnificent. Three camels flew along neck-and-neck—and such necks!—for full a hundred yards to within a few lengths of the post, their ungainly heads erect, their splay, disjointed legs opening and shutting at each stride like a dozen jack-knives worked by machinery, and their riders literally waving fore and aft with the violence of the motion, as if a giant was about to hurl them from a sling. How they held on nobody could see, and Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate, alone knew. Some knelt, grasping the brute's retorted neck; some sat or crouched on the saddle-seat; some frankly extended themselves almost at full length on the animal's mountainous dorsal ridge, and clung on to the hump as a shipwrecked sailor might cling to a rock. It was a sight to haunt the