It would be wonderful if it were otherwise. The East is full of provocatives to mirth--not merely such as seem ridiculous to a stranger because they are foreign, but things grotesque in themselves. Take the one instance of the camel. Much has been written about him from many points of view, but justice has never yet been done to the camel as a humorous person. Yet he is the most humorous of all the inhabitants of the East. Beside him, with his sardonic pleasantry, the monkey is a mountebank and the donkey but a solemn little ass. He has been described as “the tall, simple, smiling camel”; but on closer acquaintance he turns out to be hardly so simple as he might be taken for, and if he smiles, he is generally smiling at you. The camels you meet in Syria are carrying barley with the air of kings, and regarding their human companions with, at best, a sentiment of contemptuous tolerance. The lower lip of a camel is one of the most expressive features in the whole repertoire of natural history. The humours of this animal reached for us their climax at Sheikh Miskin, while we were waiting for the Damascus train. A camel had been persuaded to kneel in order to receive its load of long poles brought by the railway. It was roaring steadily, in a fiendish and yet conscientious manner. Ten men were loading it, of whom one stood upon its near fore-leg, two fastened the poles upon its back, and the remaining seven looked on and made remarks. The beast waited until the poles were all but fixed--ten of them or so. Then it indulged in a shake, which sent them rolling in all directions. Finally it was loaded, with two of the sticks on one side and one on the other, their ends projecting far out behind and in front. It rose, nearly ruining a well-dressed Arab who had somehow got in among it. Just then the train arrived and the camel fled incontinently, sidewise like a crab, spreading the fear of death in man and beast for many yards around, and dragging a terrified driver, who hung on to its head-rope, across towards the distant east. A loaded camel behaving in this fashion is a deadlier weapon than a loaded gun.