A camel doesn’t have four feet, as most lay people think; it has more than a hundred, and the more, the better.
-The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, Mohamedou Ould Slahi
It seems paradoxical that this most potent symbol of the desert should be a herd animal, if not exactly gregarious when in a group, at least more willing to join than to be left alone. Several times we passed a single grazer and a drover would then have to whip it back from the Dabouka. Otherwise it would have fallen in with our forty day death march to the Cairo slaughter houses or, if ill-suited to a fast pace, perhaps to an even earlier demise on the trail.