The Camel - Ship of the Desert

by Read Listen Learn

"The camel looks like a horse invented by a committee."

- Anon.

The Ship of the Desert, the horse with a hump – call it what you will, the camel has made it possible for people to cross and even live in the hottest and driest deserts. We can find it, naturally, in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia and, in more recent times, Australia. It is an extremely hardy animal that some people consider very ugly while others, usually those whose lives depend on camels, think them beautiful and elegant. Ugly or pretty, they have made incredible journeys possible and changed the course of history.

In 1945, at Salalah in Southern Arabia (in what is now Oman), a British special forces officer, Wilfred Thesiger, was preparing an unusual travelling party. At the end of the Second World War and during the first few years after it, large areas of North Africa and the Middle East were hit, time and again, by huge swarms of locust. The unwelcome insects destroyed most of the crops causing a famine in which millions were dying. The scientists discovered that the locusts were almost certainly breeding in a flood plain surrounded by the harshest kind of desert, peopled by armed nomads jealous of their land. The only way for a group to go in and check the locust breeding grounds was by camel.

Thesiger took only camels which had been raised in the dry heart of the desert, known as the Empty Quarter. They were the best and the toughest. Thesiger's group rode them all over the desert, slept next to them at night to keep warm, drank their milk when all other food and liquid had run out, and, when necessary, they killed one of their camels and ate its rich, red meat and then used its skin to make sandals. Thesiger found the locust breeding grounds and fixed their location on a modern map. Aeroplanes flew to the flood plain and sprayed the area with insecticide. The swarms of locust died out and, with regular spraying, never returned in such numbers. Thesiger's operation had saved millions of lives and, without camels, it would have been impossible. But, within a few years of this triumph the camel was redundant.

All the places that Thesiger had visited or passed on his amazing journey could now be reached quickly and easily by helicopter or in the new four wheel drive vehicles so beloved of the oil companies which now swarmed to the area like the locust. Thousands of years of needing camels had come to an end – but how did their story begin? And how are they so good at living in such terrible conditions?

There were several different kinds of camel in prehistoric times but only two kinds survive today: the dromedary and the bactrian. They're very easy to tell apart because the dromedary (by far the more numerous) has a single hump in the middle of its back. The bactrian has two. The dromedary is, traditionally, found in North Africa and the Middle East while its cousin, the bactrian, is found in Central Asia.

They are only seen together in Afghanistan where Central Asia and the Middle East meet. Its only other relatives in the animal kingdom are the llama family from the Andes in South America. They look like small camels without a hump and they live in the cruel Andean highlands, where extreme altitude and temperature ranges make life especially hard – just like in the desert.

The camel has some very interesting physical qualities to help it survive. The distinctive hump is the key to the camels' ability to live in deserts and desiccated areas. A camel can go several weeks without eating or drinking, because when good food and water are available to it, it can store the extra in the special fat in its hump. It has a couple of other tricks up its sleeve too to help it fight against heat and thirst.

It has special red blood cells that are egg-shaped, not round, which means it can resist great and rapid changes of temperature (typical in the desert around dawn and dusk) and also intense dehydration. It sweats just under the skin, keeping the precious liquid in its body to be recycled and 'sweated' again. Its eyelashes are very long and thick to keep sand out and it can close its nostrils and ears as well for the same reason.

These exceptional animals have long been used as transport for people and goods. To any army operating in a desert, the camel was, until a few years ago, absolutely essential. From ancient times, there has been many a camel 'cavalry' but let's look at just a few modern examples.

In 1917, during the First World War, a British agent, Colonel T.E. Lawrence and a group of Arab guerrillas took their enemy, the Turks, by complete surprise at Aqaba, a port on the Red Sea. They captured this strategic town after a long camel ride through desert that the Turks thought not even camels could cross.

Just after the First World War, in the 1920s, another British officer and Arabist, Glubb Pasha, set up a camel corps in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) to patrol the desert and the Bedouin nomads who lived there. A major problem was camel raiding, a deadly nomadic sport in which the men of one clan organised surprise attacks on the camp of another clan in order to steal as many camels as possible. Usually, a couple of men on both sides died in the raid or the pursuit that almost always came after it.

When Glubb saw that the Bedouin enjoyed this too much to stop, he made them come to the police station and write down the names of the raiding party and say who they were going to attack. On the way home from the raid, the participants had to go back to the station and say how many camels they had 'lifted' (i.e. stolen), and if anyone had been killed. If they did this, they could not be arrested by the police for any crime (murder, robbery, assault, etc.) committed during the raid. Glubb Pasha was powerless to stop camel raiding but he, at least, kept a very precise score.

Glubb was not the only man to set up a camel corps. They have existed at different times all over Africa and the Middle East but, surprisingly, the U.S. Army imported camels and set one up in California in the late 19th century. Camels were also taken to Australia around this time to service the mines and little towns in the vast Australian desert. Of course, a few of these dromedary camels escaped. They settled quickly and happily in the dry Australian landscape and began to multiply until, now, there are millions of feral camels there. In fact, Australia has started to export camels and camel meat to Arabia where, paradoxically, there are no longer feral or wild ones. The Australian camels are considered some of the best as they are descended from a few hundred, carefully chosen, Afghan camels imported about a century ago.

The bactrian, though less numerous than the dromedary, was nonetheless seen on the streets of Berlin in 1945 being used for transport by Central Asian regiments of the Soviet Army but, nowadays, Australians, Russians and others do not use camels for real transport. They have trucks, trains and cars. The camel is also used less and less in its traditional regions and so numbers have dropped greatly.

The camel that won wars and is mentioned many times in the Bible and the Quran seems to be fading from the pages of history. It won't disappear altogether, though, while there is camel racing, a hugely popular sport in Arabia and the Middle East. And, anyway, the camel is, above all else, a formidable survivor.