Page:Natural History (1848).djvu/191

 Rh know nothing of this animal in a wild condition, but in a domesticated state it has existed from the earliest times in Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, and the neighbouring countries. Herds of these useful creatures formed no small part of the pastoral wealth of the venerable patriarchs: Job had six thousand camels; and they are mentioned among the acquisitions of Abram on his first visit to Egypt. Probably the geographical range of the species has scarcely varied from those times till the present: it now spreads over the whole of Northern Africa and Southern Asia, as far as Hindostan; it has been introduced also into Italy and into the Canary Isles.

The frightful deserts of ever-shifting sand which occupy so large a space of this region, well described in Scripture as "that great and terrible wilderness," and as "waste, and howling,"—would be perfectly impassable but for the aid of this invaluable animal. Trackless and limitless, bounded everywhere by the horizon, the unstable surface ever moved and tossed by the wind, and often raised by storms into overwhelming billows, they suggest an unavoidable idea of the ocean; while the tall and ungainly animal which patiently bears its freight of human life and property across the desolation, has obtained, not from Europeans only, but even from wide-scattered tribes of Arabs, the poetical appellation of "the ship of the desert." Numerous caravans of these animals, each burdened with a load of five or six hundred pounds' weight, and arranged in long strings, patiently pursue their toilsome way beneath the scorching sun, at the rate of about twenty-four