reation are
not within its portion; that its inevitable career is forced labour and
long fastings, until death shall relieve it.

The maturation of the camel is a long affair. It cannot carry even a
single rider until its third year; and it is not in full vigour until it
is eight years old. Its trainers then begin to try it with loads,
gradually heavier and heavier. If it can rise with its burden, this is a
proof that it can carry it throughout the journey. When that journey is
only of brief duration, they sometimes load the animal in excess, and
then they aid it to rise by means of bars and levers. The camel's
capacity for labour endures for a long time. Provided that at certain
periods of the year it is allowed a short holiday for pasturing at its
leisure, it will continue its service for fully fifty years.

Nature has provided the camel with no means of defence against other
animals, unless you may so consider its piercing, prolonged cry, and its
huge, shapeless, ugly frame, which resembles, at a distance, a heap of
ruins. It seldom kicks, and when it does, it almost as seldom inflicts
any injury. Its soft, fleshy foot cannot wound, or even bruise you;
neither can the camel bite an antagonist. In fact, its only practical
means of defence against man or beast is a sort of vehement sneeze,
wherewith it discharges, from nose and mouth, a mass of filth against the
object which it seeks to intimidate or to annoy.

Yet the entire male camels, _bore_ as the Tartars call them, (_temen_
being the generic appellation of the animal), are very formidable during
the twelfth moon, which is their rutting time. At this period, their
eyes are inflamed; an oily, fetid humour exhales from their heads; their
mouths are constantly foaming; and they eat and drink absolutely nothing
whatever. In this state of excitement they rush at whatever presents
itself, man or beast, with a fierceness of precipitation which it is
impossible to avoid or to resist; and when they have overthrown the
object they have pursued, they pound it beneath the weight of their
bodies. The epoch passed, the camel resumes its ordinary gentleness, and
the routine of its laborious career.

The females do not produce young until their sixth or seventh year; the
period of gestation is fourteen months. The Tartars geld most of their
male camels, which, by this operation, acquire a greater development of
strength, height, and size. Their voices become at t