The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder Read Free Page B

about them. Finally Mahmet would lead Djemal to the group of staring tourists, tap Djemal and yell a command for him to kneel.
    The hair on Djemal’s knees, front legs and back, was quite worn off, so his skin looked like old leather there. As for the rest of him, he was shaggy brown with some clotted patches, other patches nearly bare, as if moths had been at him. But his big brown eyes were clear, and his generous, intelligent lips had a pleasant look as if he were constantly smiling, though this was far from the truth. At any rate, he was only seventeen, in the prime of life, and unusually large and strong. He was shedding now because it was summer.
    “Ooooooh!—Eeeeeek!” a plump lady screamed, jolted from side to side as Djemal stood up to his impressive full height. “The ground looks miles away!”
    “Don’t fall! Hang on! That sand’s not as soft as it looks!” warned an Englishman’s voice.
    Little filthy Mahmet, in dusty robes, tugged at Djemal’s bridle, and off they went at walking pace, Djemal slapping his broad feet down on the sand and gazing about wherever he wished, at the white domes of the town against the blue sky, at an automobile purring along the road, at a yellow mountain of lemons by the roadside, at other camels walking or loading or unloading their human cargo. This woman, any human being, felt like no weight at all, nothing like the huge sacks of lemons or oranges he often had to carry, or the sacks of plaster, or even the bundles of young trees that he transported far into the desert sometimes.
    Once in a while, even the tourists would argue in their hesitant, puzzled-sounding voices with Mahmet. Some argument about price. Everything was price. Everything came down to dinars. Dinars, paper and coin, could make men whip out daggers, or raise fists and hit each other in the face.
    Turbaned Mahmet in his pointed, turned-up-toed shoes and billowing old djellaba, looked more like an Arab than the Arabs. He meant himself to be a tourist attraction, photogenic (he charged a small fee to be photographed) with a gold ring in one ear and a pinched, sun-tanned visage which was almost hidden under bushy eyebrows and a totally untended beard. One could hardly see his mouth in all the hair. His eyes were tiny and black. The reason the other camel drivers hated him was because he did not abide by the set price for a camel ride that the others had established. Mahmet would promise to stick to it, then if a tourist happened to approach him with a pitiable attempt to bargain (as Mahmet knew they had been advised to do), Mahmet would lower the price slightly, thus getting himself some business, and putting the tourist in such a good mood for having succeeded in bargaining, that the tourist often tipped more than the difference at the end of the ride. On the other hand, if business was good Mahmet would up his price, knowing it would be accepted—and this sometimes in the hearing of the other drivers. Not that the other drivers were paragons of honesty, but they had informal agreements, and mostly stuck to them. For Mahmet’s dishonesty, Djemal sometimes suffered a stone thrown against his rump, a stone meant for Mahmet.
    After a good tourist day, which often went on till nearly dark, Mahmet would tie Djemal up to a palm tree in town and treat himself to a meal of couscous in a shack of a restaurant which had a terrace and a squawking parrot. Meanwhile Djemal might not have had any water even, because Mahmet took care of his own needs first, and Djemal would nibble the tree leaves that he could reach. Mahmet ate alone at a table, eschewed by the other camel drivers who sat at another table together, making a lot of merry noise. One of them played a stringed instrument between courses. Mahmet chewed his lamb bones in silence and wiped his fingers on his robes. He left no tip.
    Maybe he took Djemal to the public fountain, maybe he didn’t, but he rode while Djemal walked into the desert to the clump of