…an easy pace, not very fatiguing…yet even this was sometimes alleviated by our sometimes being able to dismount from our camels and get upon our asses…
-Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Penninsula of Sinai, Karl Richard Lepsius, 1853, on crossing the Nubian Desert
I think Lepsius was more than happy to alternate rubbing his bottom in opposite directions, forward/backward and up/down, depending on his mount’s natural gait. We were stuck with only the fore and aft because we had no up and down trotting donkeys in our herd and forward/backward is the way camels walk, despite the fact that I rode on a Bardha’a, Ass Saddle, which Lane gives a secondary meaning to as Land Neither Hard Nor Soft.