orse from the English
cart-horse. The ordinary load for a pack camel is about 400 lb., and
in hot weather good camels will march 20 to 25 m. daily and only
require water every third or fourth day: in cool weather, with ample
green fodder they can go twenty-five days or more without drinking. A
good _dalul_ or riding camel will carry his rider 100 m. a day for a
week on end. Nolde gives an instance from his own experience of a
camel rider covering 62 m. in seven hours. The pure-bred riding camel
is only found in perfection in inner Arabia; for some unexplained
reason when taken out of their own country or north of the 30th degree
they rapidly degenerate.

Horse.

The horse does not occupy the important position in the Bedouin
economy that is popularly supposed. In Nejd the number of horses is,
comparatively speaking, very small; the want of water in the Nafud
where alone forage is obtainable, and the absence of forage in the
neighbourhood of the towns makes horse-breeding on a large scale
impracticable there. Horses are in fact only kept by the principal
sheiks, and by far the larger proportion of those now in Nejd are the
property of the amir and his family. These are kept most of the year
in the Nafud, five or ten days' march from Hail, where they find their
own food on the desert herbage. When a raid is in contemplation, they
are brought in and given a little barley for a few weeks. Reared in
this way they are capable of marvellous endurance, marching during a
raid twenty hours a day for eight or ten days together. As a rule,
they are only mounted at the moment of attack, or in pursuit. Water
and forage have to be carried for them on camels.

The great majority of the horses that come into the market as Arabs,
are bred in the northern desert and in Mesopotamia, by the various
sections of the Aneza and Shammar tribes, who emigrated from Nejd
generations ago, taking with them the original Nejd stock. In size and
appearance, and in everything but endurance, these northern horses are
admittedly superior to the true Nejdi. A few of the latter are
collected by dealers in the nomad camps and exported chiefly from
Kuwet. The amir Mahommed Ibn Rashid used to send down about one
hundred young horses yearly.

Asses of excellent quality are bred all over the country; they are
much used as mounts by the richer townsmen. Except in the settled
distr