# Camels

A camel is a large mammal, used in the Middle East as a beast of burden. It has (depending on the species) one or two large humps on its back.

## Quotes

* It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
** The Bible, (Luke 18:25)
* CAMEL, n. A quadruped (the Splaypes humpidorsus) of great value to the show business. There are two kinds of camels -- the camel proper and the camel improper. It is the latter that is always exhibited.
** Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).
* Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.
** Jorge Luis Borges, "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923)
* A camel's hump is an ugly lump
** Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories, "How the Camel got his hump".
* 'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
** Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, opening words.
* The camel has a single hump, The dromedary, two; Or else the other way around; I'm never sure. Are you?
** Ogden Nash, The Camel.
* Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
** William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act iii. Sc. 2.
* The voice of any camel has a wide range in pessimistic eloquence; beyond question a camel has a vocabulary and can say many things, all of them discontented.
** Booth Tarkington, The Plutocrat, chapter 28.
* Looking athwart the burning flats, far off Seen by the high-necked camel on the verge Journeying southward
** Alfred Tennyson, A Fragment.
* "A tradtionalist told me from one who had told him from Muhammad b. Talha from Uthman v. Abdul-Rahman that in the raid of Muharib and B. Thalaba the apostle had captured a slave called Yasar, and he put him in charge of his milch-camels to shepherd them in the neighborhood of al-Jamma. Some men of Qays of Kubba of Bajila came to the apostle suffering from an epidemic and enlarged spleens, and the apostle told them that if they went to the milch camels and drank their milk and their urine they would recover, so off they went.
** From The Sirat Rasul Allah ( The Life of The Prophet of God ), by Ibn Ishaq (3) pages 677, 678
* Narrated Anas: Some people from the tribe of 'Ukl came to the Prophet and embraced Islam. The climate of Medina did not suit them, so the Prophet ordered them to go to the (herd of milch) camels of charity and to drink, their milk and urine (as a medicine).
** Sahih Bukhari 8:82:794
* Anas b. Malik reported that some people belonging (to the tribe) of 'Uraina came to Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) at Medina, but they found its climate uncongenial. So Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said to them: If you so like, you may go to the camels of Sadaqa and drink their milk and urine. They did so and were all right.
** Sahih Muslim 16:4130