I found dromedary riding not at all difficult…I rode from eight to ten hours a day, read and even dreamed in the saddle, and at night I was as fresh and unwearied as when I’d mounted in the morning.
-Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), A Journey to Central Africa, Describing his desert crossing from Egypt to Sudan
Because Taylor was a noted American poet, he may be permitted the use of poetic license even when he writes of camels. But dreaming while riding? Hardly. No doubt his poem ‘Kubleh’, beginning with the lines, ‘The black-eyed children of the Desert drove/Their flocks together at the set of sun/The tents were pitched; the weary camels bent/…’, could have used a faster beat, perhaps the Arabic meter called Rajaz named for an animal disease making a she-camel’s haunches shake and tremble- as seen in Voice of the Whip at 21’40”- in the same frequency as its long and short syllables. But then again, Kubleh was about a horse, not a camel, so how was he to know a Rajaz from an Iamb?