camel-herds

Updated: May 17, 2025

I had some difficulty in persuading our good friend Furayj, who had not seen the country for fifteen years, to engage as guide one of the many Bedawin camel-herds: his course seemed to serpentine like that of an animal grazing he said it was intended to show the least stony road and, when he pointed with the wave of the maimed right hand, he described an arc of some 90 . The Sulaymi lad caught the nearest camel, climbed its sides as you would a tree, and, when the animal set off at a lumbering gallop, pressed the soles of his feet to the ribs, with exactly the action of a Simiad; clinging the while, like grim Death, to the hairy hump.

Sir Richard Francis Burton - The Land of Midian — Volume 2