Why Agatha Christie never made camel soufflé
PAUL JOHNSON Funny creatures have begun to appear in Somerset. Little herds of vicuna, llamas and guanaco, and other similar animals. They are farmed for various purposes, chiefly hair. We already have riding camels, but I am expecting camels to appear any moment as a dairy herd. What, can you drink camel's milk? Certainly. The view of Dr Ulrich Wernery, a vet and microbiologist, is that it is `the nearly perfect animal product for humans'. This ingenious German has for 20 years been looking after the hawks, horses and camels of the Emir of Dubai, and I learn from the Financial Times that he has now assembled a herd of 500 milking camels to produce the stuff on a commercial scale.
Camel's milk is top-hole because it has only half the fat of cow's milk, has more Vitamin C and can be drunk by those unhappy children who are 'lactose intolerant' (I know of one case, and life is very hard for those so afflicted). What would Mark Twain have said about this? He said he had met many camels in Syria and found 'they will eat pine knots or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had oysters for dinner'. In chapter 3 of Roughing It (my favourite book of his), he says he once watched horrified when a camel seized his overcoat 'and examined it with a critical eye all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it'. Instead he ate the sleeves, first one then the other; then the velvet collar, 'opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before'. The trouble arose when some manuscripts fell out of the overcoat pocket, and he gobbled them, 'and began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity'. Eventually Twain's writings — 'jokes and solid wisdom' — did for him. 'he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's work-bench and died a death of indescribable agony'.
The fact is, camels provoke tall stories, and one does not know what to believe about their milk. It is certainly not true they will eat anything. In Egypt I have offered camels Burmese cigars, old hankies, devalued drachmas and newspaper articles by John Pilger, and all were flatly refused — indeed, on the last occasion the creature spat in my face. What is true is that they can go for a long way, for a long time, on very little. They accumulate in their hump stores of fat which they can use as a kind of nutritional bank account when times are hard. They can even oxidise the fat and use it as water if none is available. Give the brute a little grass and it can go without water for five days easily. If the temperature is fairly low, it dispenses with water for up to a fortnight — one case of 17 days without a drop is recorded. They do this by varying their internal temperature in some mysterious way. Human beings who lose even 10 per cent of body weight through dehydration need immediate hospital treatment and they may die all the same. But a camel's body slows down its dehydration process. Even so, it can lose up to 30 per cent of its body weight and still carry on — the vital functions are not inhibited. Then, when water is available — this is the good bit — they can gulp down 30 gallons without stopping at the rate of 25 pints a minute, and in a quarter of an hour they have regained their normal avoirdupois.
I find riding a camel an uncomfortable and anxious form of transportation, but then I have not done much of it. A man who had once commanded a squadron in the old camel corps of Middle East Land Forces told me, 'You can fall asleep on a clever camel which knows the way, don't you know. Shouldn't like to do that on a horse.' But then this leathery old sweat was full of stables mythology, such as that if you were bitten by a Giza camel (pronounced geezer), you were liable to be infected with syphilis, handed down by royal camels since the time of the Fourth Dynasty pharaohs, early in the third millennium sc. My camel man told me that a good Arabian camel, trained for riding and properly looked after, could maintain an average speed of up to 10 miles an hour for as long as 18 hours.
But then it is said that Mohammed, riding his fast camel, Al Adha, went all the way from Jerusalem to Mecca in four stages. That was a miracle of course. His favourite camel, however, was Al Kasura, which knelt at a sign from God. Not easy to become fond of a camel, I imagine, though some of those gaunt and dauntless ladies who once played leading roles in the Middle East — Gertrude Bell, for example, and Mrs Leonard Wooley, wife of the man who excavated Ur of the Chaldees and discovered `the Flood Level' — managed to do so. Agatha Christie, wife of Max Mallowan, also an archaeologist, was another English lady who had to deal with camels, for she accompanied him on all his digs. Does she bring a camel into any of her detective stories? Rose Macaulay used one to provide an arresting opening for her delightful novel, The Towers of Trebizond: "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from that animal on her return from High Mass.'
The camel is not, however, a literary animal, albeit Ogden Nash devoted a poem to it: The camel has a single hump; The dromedary, two; Or else the other way around, I'm never sure. Are you?
On the other hand it is certainly a biblical one, occurring many times in the text. There is even a variant (1823) known as the Camel Bible because in Genesis it refers to Rebecca 'and her camels' instead of 'maidens'. Both Mark and Matthew give as one of Jesus's sayings the admonition against wealth and getting a millionaire or a dromedary through a narrow space. This gave Charles Dickens one of his best Mrs Gamp jokes: 'Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain't so easy for them to see out of a needle's eye. That's my comfort, and I 'opes I knows it.' There is a similar saying about camels and needle's eyes in the Koran, and I suppose to inhabitants of the Ancient Near East the camel was the largest animal they had ever seen or heard of.
What does surprise us is that John the Baptist, while living rough on his baptising sessions near the River Jordan, eating locusts, should have sported a camel-hair coat. One thinks of black-market operators in the immediate postwar years, at the time of the 'Attlee Terror', who wore such garments as a sign of ostentation, the pockets filled with wedges of banknotes, known as 'gold bricks'. But the answer is that John wore the coarse outer hairs of the camel, a material still in use today in industry for beltings and cloths for extracting the juice from oilseeds. The camel hair we know is from the undercoat, whose ultra-fine fibre has a diameter as little as five microns.
Did the Baptist drink the milk too? I have never tasted it. Those who have tend to say it's horrid. But this may be due to faulty pasteurisation. If the temperature is too high, the sterilised result has a bad flavour. The Dubai people have worked on this, however, and claim they have solved the problem. You can now get it plain, or flavoured with saffron, strawberry and date. The product as an entity has the trademark Camelicious. My trouble is not the taste but the fact that anything about a camel, from the sardonic curl of its lip to the truly woeful noise it makes when it dies, or pretends to, makes me laugh. You can't take camels seriously.
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