Whoever reads this book will find out a very great deal about camels; of that I am sure.
-The Camel and the Wheel, Richard Bulliet, from Apologia
It has been a somewhat lonely task that has occasionally approached becoming an obsession. Those who have borne with it in this guise, the ones with suppressed yawns and sinking eyelids who have listened to me expatiate on the subject for hours on end, deserve my profoundest thanks.
-from Acknowledgments
Professor Bulliet doesn’t know the half of it. Pity that he wasn’t seated at the campfire on any of those nights on the Darb. On the matter of camels, from KhairAllah and the drovers he would have gotten as well as he gave. For hours on end? In Dar al-Kababish you’d need weeks.