The regular and scarcely audible tread of the camel sheds a drowsy influence on your reveries; your daydreams pass into slumberous visions; you waver in your seat and it is rather an instinctive impulse than a conscious effort that braces you in your saddle and saves you from a disasterous fall.
-George Perkins Marsh, The Desert, American Whig Review, 1852
There was never a danger of losing yourself to a slumberous reverie and falling off your camel as Gasim did in the Devil’s Anvil, the fear being not that you’d be left behind but rather trampled by the Dabouka.