The camel - a most difficult animal to draw because although pronounced in its articulations, yet in its movements most loose and undecided.
-Journal of the Society of Arts, Vol 13, April 21 1865, a review of Walton’s The Camel
Among the numerous friends who have aided me during the progress of the Work, I am happy to record my special obligations to John Patterson, Esq., MD, of Cairo…for the loan of his instruments of dissection and other valuable services.
-The Camel: Its Anatomy, Proportions, and Paces, London 1865, by Elijah Walton, watercolorist and draftsman of illustrated books offering instruction on how to paint objects of natural history such as camels, mountain geology, clouds, and other atmospheric effects
Walton spent the years 1860-62 in Egypt and the Middle East painting and dissecting camels. The 94 plates in his anatomical atlas of the camel show a close attention to the muscles, veins, and bone structure of the head, the hoof, and other body parts. He describes the anatomy unique to the camel- its nostril flap, its flexible neck, its prehensile lip- and the footprints left by its walk, run, and gallop.
I only saw one camel being butchered for meat, this one midway on the trail as it was dying of exhaustion in a couched position. Its throat was cut and its head and neck pulled taut with a halter so it would fully bleed out. We made a deep cut along its back bone, diverting the incision around the hump, from shoulder to tail, then pulled the skin free on both sides to lay it out like a picnic cloth on the ground. With that, the butchers got busy and very bloody.
I imagine what Walton’s job was like. Just as our drovers cut the meat into cook pot-size pieces and pulled the skin from the head and hoofs after we had buried them in a sand-covered fire pit over night then dug them up in the morning, so he must have done a lot of pulling and cutting. The drovers carried daggers honed sharp on both sides of the blade. Thanks to his friend Dr. Patterson, he used an autopsist’s bone saws and scalpels. Both they and he did the job of loosening the camel’s articulations and deciding where next to dissect. One did it for art’s sake, the others for dinner.
