I’m staring at a poster in the camel museum. At the centre of the poster: a large, cartoon impression of a camel. Out from the camel, in little squiggling offshoots, photos of camels pulling various different-but-extremely-similar camel faces. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and you will see nothing but glassy tranquillity staring back. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and it will calmly blink and chew cud. But no, this poster says. Camels contain multitudes. ‘APPEAL OF CAMEL PERSONALITY,’ it reads. ‘Family Bond’, ‘Sensitive’, ‘Loyal’, ‘Smart’, ‘Defending’. The next attribute is portmanteaued into one with a backslash: ‘Bossy/Leaders’. And there, hovering up around the original cartoon camel’s ear area, a single word, in rigid black: ‘Fear’.
Everything is camels and camels are everything, here at … the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, Saudi Arabia!
* * *
CALL: Why were you at a camel festival in Saudi Arabia?
RESPONSE: Because it was there, and when something is there, it is human nature to go and look at it.
CALL: What is a camel festival like? What is a camel festival?
RESPONSE: I don’t know exactly because the camel festival I went to started being constructed in March 2017, i.e. six weeks exactly before I arrived in Saudi Arabia to come and look at it, so necessarily was entirely incomplete, and actually on balance I saw far fewer camels than you might have expected me to, on the whole, seeing as I flew all the way to Saudi Arabia to go and see camels,
CALL: What actually was it then?
RESPONSE: It was basically just a big car park with a load of camels in it. I flew seven hours and drove two. That’s what it was. It was a car park full of camels, in Saudi Arabia.
CALL: Would you highly recommend the camel festival as a fun continental tourist retreat?
RESPONSE: No I wouldn’t go so far as to say the word ‘highly’, no.
* * *
So I am in a tent, later now, trying to understand the appeal of camels. At my feet: a discarded tray-plate of grilled chicken, Gulf Sea prawns, rice, fruit, om ali, a pudding that is essentially cornflakes soaked in milk and warmed up with some cashews in it; to my right, a small cushion-plinth on which is resting two (two.) disposable paper cups of Arabian coffee and a larger plastic cup of sweet chai. The sun is blurrily setting and the sky turns dark from blue. There is a boy whose job in the tent is seemingly to bring me tea and coffee whenever I hold up a hand to say ‘tea’ or ‘coffee’. When he is not bringing me tea and coffee he just stands on the balls of his feet, staring covertly at the TV. There is something unusual about seeing a huge, clean-new HD TV plugged into a tent: in amongst rugs lining walls to deflect the searing heat of the sun, one perfect clear window, a slash of tech amongst the sand. On the television is an old BBC Two show where modern-day families live life for a day as either a slave or a lord in a Downton Abbey-style home, dubbed in Arabic. Earlier: a British nature documentary, where for some reason the monkeys in it were dubbed to have voices, and somehow, despite speaking Arabic, here, the monkeys have British accents. The refreshments boy brings me some more chai. I have been in the sun for ten hours and I am delirious. The monkeys are British and the camels are beautiful.
‘It’s like,’ the translator, Ali, is telling me. ‘It’s like … young men, you know? To show off they have some money … it’s like: a camel.’
I say: ‘Right.’
‘So it’s like … horses. Or: falcons. You have falcons?’
‘No we do not.’
‘You don’t have falcons?’
‘We don’t have falcons.’
‘Ahhhh: that’s why you liked the falcons.’
Earlier we saw some falcons and yeah, alright, I’ll be honest: I lost my shit about the falcons. I liked the falcons.
‘Huh.’
For a moment we both pause in the heavy, heavy heat, trying to think of a British equivalent to camels that aren’t horses or falcons. ‘I guess,’ I say, and I am thinking of Instagram, and how the people I follow who are in a good place in their life use it, and what they show off about, and how they might mark the occasion of their good fortune and express it through ownership of an animal. ‘I guess … dogs? Pedigree dogs? Like a bulldog?’
Ali thinks for a moment, strokes his beard.
‘Yeah I mean I guess,’ he says. ‘Yeah. I suppose.’
But no. What I am learning is in Arabia, camel-liking is some curious mix of football fandom, Crufts, Max Power masculinity and hump acknowledgement. That camels aren’t like dogs, or horses, or falcons. What I am learning out here, in the heat and the sand and the flies and the dates, what I’m learning is this: there is nothing. There is nothing Quite Like A Camel.
* * *
There are two types of camels in Saudi Arabia, black camels and white camels. It is, if you go deeper, more nuanced than that (there is an oft-repeated never-fact-checked eskimos-and-snow type factoid about camels – ‘In Arabic,’ people say, ‘they have over 1,000 words for camel!’ which no, they don’t, but it’s certainly true that there are up to 40 types and sub-types of camel, and there are words for that, same way we have words like ‘pug’ and ‘Labrador’, but in Saudi Arabia they don’t go around yelling, ‘The British people! Those lardy fools. Those pastry pigs have over a million-and-a-half words for dogs!’), but for now – knowing in advance the onslaught of camel information I am about to hit you with – it is easier if we just divide into the black camel from the south (majaheem) and the white camel from the north (maghateer).
Camels have two stomachs. Camels walk like this: right front leg and right back leg, then left front leg and left back leg. Get on all fours and try and do that now. You can’t. No other animal on earth walks like a camel. Camels: camels can consume 30 gallons of water in 13 minutes, then not drink again for several weeks. When camels exhale, their nostrils are designed to capture tiny droplets of moisture from their breath and recycle in back into their bodies. There are 1.7 million camels in Saudi Arabia, so 3.4 million stomachs. There are 7.1 million camels in Somalia. Camel hair can be weaved into a rough fabric that is useful for making rugs and desert tents out of. Camel meat can be consumed. Camel milk is thick, frothy, and warm from the teat. Look into a gawping camel mouth if you want to see a brief glimmer of hell. Camel feet are just two fat toes with hard nails and a thick wad of skin like a shoe beneath it. Camels are designed to experience extreme heat variations – both hot and cold, as the day turns into the cool night – and are barely ever sweaty. A camel can spit enough in one go to entirely cover the top half of you – you, a puny human in a t-shirt – the entire top half of you and your body. This is all by way of saying that camels are freaks, basically, absolutely irregular cunts, and not as you thought before just lumpy horses, and that, in a way, is why they are celebrated and revered, and that is why I am in Saudi Arabia to look at them.
The King Abdulaziz Camel Festival takes place 140 km north-east of Riyadh, and is known colloquially as the ‘Miss Camel’ beauty pageant. This isn’t exactly true: the camels paraded here are judged on a variety of factors, which we will get into, which all together can be added together to make some vague approximation of ‘beauty’, but calling it ‘Miss Camel’ suggests camels in thick rouge and red lipstick, stiltedly walking on stilettos, turning on the spot at the end of a catwalk and shuffling back behind a glittering curtain while a Donald Trump type, half-hard and glimmering beneath the stage lights, whoops and hollers in horny delight. But instead it’s just a racetrack in the middle of the desert (there is literally one stand; the rest of the track opens out into an expanse of nothing, as deep as the sea) with a load of camels racing in a pack over it, chunter–chunter–chunter, and four men with clipboards nod at them appreciatively. You know when you go to a party and it’s just, like, popping? Something intangible and electric in the air. An unsynthesised form of excitement you can’t emulate or explain. A vibe. So, right, you know that feeling? Now imagine the exact opposite of it. With camels.
It’s like this where, for three small hours in the morning, camels rove forwards and back, while a sort-of-full but-not-actually-very-full set of newly erected bleachers rumbles with the stomping of a few hundred men in thobes. I am allowed onto the track for a bit to take photos – camel herders with plastic neon sticks gallop to the front, making high ya–ya–ya–ya! whistling sounds as the camel pack moves calmly behind them, parading in front of a handful of distant judges, sweeping past them once, twice, three times maybe, then hurdling off into the distance, all while a crowd of a few hundred men hold their hands up to their eyes to squint and watch them in silence. And that’s it. 11 a.m. and it’s done. Everyone files out to the camel festival village, to look at pictures of camels instead of actual ones. Some people just file back on a coach and go home. That’s it. That’s the camel festival. Also this goes on for six weeks. What is anyone getting from this?
* * *
So early morning at this camel festival, that’s when the actual camel festivalling happens. This is before the sun comes up and sears the ground beneath it: though camels can cope in extremes of heat and dryness, humans can’t, so if you want to watch some camels on parade, you take an early breakfast and get out there between 9 a.m. and 11. The thing is, I’m still getting my head around the logistics of this: as a guest of the camel festival, I’m sleeping here at what’s known as a barracks, a sort of grim grey prefabricated building a short drive from the central camel village. The rest of the King Abdulaziz camel festival stretches off around me: a small central hub, the aforementioned village, a tarmacked space that can be walked from one end to the other in about three minutes flat, home to a bustling trinket market, a camel museum, an observatory (???). Then, up beyond that, you have the parade grounds: an arching racecourse-type structure, with a grey-white stand and spaced railings that lead out into the desert, where paddocks await the prizest camels; and then … and then I mean there is just a massive, massive, Disneyland-sized car park, which is almost entirely empty. And that’s it.
So what I don’t understand is this: did this crowd of camel-liking men, here at 8 a.m. in the morning, did they drive here from Riyadh today? Did they get in a Jeep or on a coach at six actual a.m. and drive here to look at camels today? Or did they sleep here, in tents and barracks unseen, and wake up still quite early to whoop and cheer at camels? And where did they go again after they had looked? A few piled on to a coach, I saw them. A few milled around the village section before the heat of the sun made being outside unbearable for more than a few minutes. Who. Has. Come. Here. To. Look. At. The. Camels. Apart. From. Me.
Where. Are. They. Going.
Where. Are. They. From.
Does. Anyone. Actually. Like. Camels. That. Fucking. Much.
* * *
‘Yeah so I’ve been learning about camels. I’ve only seen, like, six camels though. I saw the camel museum, I saw some facilities at the village. I drank some camel milk. But I didn’t see a whole lot of camels. So I’m trying to understand the appeal, and I think I’m getting there, but I want to see some actual camels tomorrow. Are you into camels?’
‘No.’
‘Okay.’
/ INTERVIEW ENDS
* * *
Saudi Arabia is banking on people liking camels that much. Not just the Saudi people, though it is for them – ‘Tradition,’ a financial officer tells me, ‘it’s not just for foreign people, it’s for us. The younger generation. We don’t care about those kinds of things. Others, they, you know, they’re city guys, they don’t care about camels. If you forget your past then you don’t have one.’ – but also a hub for camel-liking nations that surround Saudi – Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, UAE, Bahrain, Iraq – to come and gaze. The King Abdulaziz is part of Saudi’s ‘Vision 2030’ project, a sort of country-wide civil service-led scheme to start the engine of tourism in the country by pouring gallons and gallons of petrol into the tank of it (money. In this analogy that means ‘money’) and yank wildly at the rip cord, hoping some errant spark will judder the whole thing to life.
They probably need to sort the visa thing out before that becomes a reality, though. Traditionally, entry to Saudi Arabia has been a case of getting on an aeroplane and riding it through a series of loopholes: a visa is required for every visitor, non-native female travellers must be met by a sponsor at the airport, anyone who has ever been to Israel before is going to have a really rough time at the airport, &c. &c. &c. Theory dictates that these notoriously strict guidelines have been loosened recently, to reflect the friendly new face of Saudi Arabia, but in reality nobody at the airport seems to have ever seen a visa confirmation message in their life and seem intent on holding me – tired and crumpled from a seven-hour flight, body melting in that way bodies only melt when you take them from the skin-tightening air-conditioning of an aircraft cabin and put them in the pregnant dry heat of an Arab country at night – and long story short I have to wait for two hours on a sterile hospital waiting room-style seat while three lads in a back office hold on to my passport, occasionally scrolling through WhatsApp on one iPhone before dipping into a pocket to retrieve another, slightly more cracked iPhone, then scrolling through WhatsApp on that, and then deciding finally I can leave and begrudgingly stamp the paperwork – that was there on the desk next to them all along – to allow me to do that. It is five o’clock in the morning and my taxi glides across new tarmac like it is ice, and the sunrise here is gorgeous, inky blue night ceding to orange, hazy day, like someone took a big thumb and smudged the two colours together, and the air is crisp and cool before the day has started enough to heat it. Sunrise here is astounding: it makes you pensive, reflective, sad and quiet. It makes you want to take every visa worker in the airport and bury them where they’ll never find them, out there in the sand.
* * *
At breakfast a man tells me he used to live in London, for several years, although can’t remember where. ‘Somewhere west,’ he says. I ask him if it was Shepherd’s Bush. It wasn’t. I am out of ideas. It’s hard to elegantly move away from someone in a Bedouin tent – you are both sat on the floor, so you have to creak up into a standing position then move all the way over to the other side of what is the same tent, so I just don’t – so we sit in silence for a while, both looking in opposite directions, quietly eating fruit. Later – hours later, as I am stood on the sand photographing hundreds of camels – he stalks up behind me and yells ‘EALING!’ at my shoulder, and now we are friends forever. Here’s what my mate says about camels:
A GOOD CAMEL, AS PER A LAD WHO USED TO LIVE IN EALING FOR A BIT BUT NOW LIVES BACK IN SAUDI ARABIA, WHERE CAMELS ARE
— Small ears (ideally ones that point sort of up, though pointing back had been mooted as beautiful as well);
— Shapely neck w/ low dip;
— Hump is a smooth shape but goes sort of ‘back’???? Not sure very hard to describe;
— Big lips;
— Docile demeanour.
Do you have a camel, I ask. Yes, he says, one. He keeps it in the desert, at some stables. He hasn’t seen it for a few weeks since he’s been working here. He pauses. ‘Being around a camel …’ and he grapples in the air for a bit, searching for the word. ‘It’s just nice.’
* * *
Things you will see discarded in the desert on the drive from Riyadh to the camel festival, a list: single grey-black tyres, warped and worn in the heat of the sun; pairs of shoes, quite often, for some reason; an entire pushed-over barrel of oil, a small slick puddle of purest jet black against the sizzling orange of the desert sand; that’s it.
* * *
‘What kind of camels do you like?’
‘I don’t understand the question.’
‘What camels do you like? What kind of camels do you like?’
‘Like black ones? White ones?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I kind of prefer the black ones. They are handsome and shiny like a good horse is.’
[Laughing, for some reason]
‘Maybe that means you are an angry person. The black camel is the angry camel.’
I have just had my fortune read by my camel preference.
‘The white camel is the lovely camel.’
‘Okay.’
* * *
I’m sharing the drive with a journalist from Dubai who has covered camels and camel festivals every conceivable way in the past ten years and speaks fluent Arabic and is speaking it, very rapidly for two straight hours, in the car ride over there, and who is completely bored of camels by now, oh my god. ‘Ugh,’ she says. ‘Camels, camels, camels. My boss wants an angle beyond “This Camel Sold for $1 Million!”, but …’ – she gestures at a camel. ‘You know.’ What is this whole camel thing about, then, I ask her. ‘Money,’ she purrs.
* * *
This spot in the middle of the desert was chosen for its historical significance: it’s a sort of perfect meeting point between the north, west, east and south of the country (the south, known by the quietly horrifying nickname ‘The Empty Quarter’, which just really sounds like there are lots of haunted skeletons, half-eroded into the sand, that live there, guarding crowns and lavish old jewels), so was traditionally a useful point of trade. That doesn’t quite explain why there is nothing here, nothing surrounding here, no trace of life before this, just desert, in every direction, newly criss-crossed with slivers of tarmac and this camel village, but I’m rolling with it. Here is where new tradition crashes into the old: save for a few baby camels who were whizzed in folded in the back of a Toyota pick-up, most of the 30,000 animals on display here walked to the venue over a period of a few weeks. There were fears, years ago, that camels would start to die out in the Gulf, replaced in terms of practicality by SUVs and cars – that, without the need for the ships of the desert, camels would fade away, and with it an irretrievable facet of the country’s tradition, but instead it sort of boomed in a hobbyist way nobody could have predicted – and now, if nothing else, the festival proves animal and machine can still live together, out here, in the sand.
* * *
I’m hanging out in the media tent trying to find WiFi (there is no WiFi) (obviously there is no WiFi; I am in a fucking desert) when a softly spoken man comes over to me to quietly tell me that sorry, he doesn’t speak English. ‘That’s okay,’ I say, loudly. ‘Thank you.’ He offers me Arabian coffee from the Arabian coffee table. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Thank you, though.’ The man who cannot speak English says, slowly:
‘You smile. Like … a British footballer.’
Thanks!
* * *
The first camel I see is an extremely sick small three-day old baby that seems an awful lot – an awful lot – as if it is dying, lying weak and prone under a small flap of cardboard while its owner lifts and rubs his head, makes little kth–kth–kth noises into its ear, flopping it back down again, its neck lolling sickeningly in the heat. The journalist who knows how to speak Arabic bends and talks to him: ‘My friend is a vet,’ she says, calling on speakerphone. ‘He can help.’ She yells into the phone for what seems like ages before a harsh, digital voice rings back. ‘Acupuncture,’ she says, to the camel owner. ‘He needs acupuncture.’ Everyone seems chill about the dying camel. The camel guy picks him up and flops him down again. I am telling you this camel is fucked. Acupuncture cannot help it.
* * *
Now we’re in a tent drinking camel milk. Camel milk, in review: it is just milk but it’s warm because it just came out of a titty and also it froths up like crazy. I didn’t not like it. It was milk. Whatever. Drink the milk, enjoy the milk. There is always something holy about milk. It is the liquid of life. A body can produce a nourishing meal. It makes babies thrive. Milk is magical. Later, in the Bedouin tent, a man who understands more English than he can speak asks me if I drank the milk. Yes, I say. Very nice. He erupts with laughter, as do all the other tent lads, filed around the edges of the rug, the room shaking. I am lost in a sea of foreign giggles. Ali, the translator, helps:
‘Because it— it makes you have a reaction.’ He gestures his stomach. ‘Some people.’ It makes you shit? ‘Yes.’ But I didn’t shit, I tell them. I am wearing tan-coloured trousers. If I had a very urgent camel shit you would know about it. I didn’t shit myself! Ali does not translate this. ‘Eh, it’s only some people.’ Tell them I didn’t shit! ‘It’s like, ten per cent of people.’ I turn to them, shake my head and gesture my stomach, scissoring my palms in front of it. I didn’t shit! I didn’t shit! There is no explaining this. They definitely think I did shit.
I just do not understand why you would give someone shit-yourself juice, in welcoming them to your country. That’s all.
* * *
Here is a camel-parade fact that I cannot fit in anywhere else: sometimes, in amongst the parade camels, replete in festive decorative dress and being ridden by a guy with a neon cane yelling ya–ya–ya–yai!, there is a Toyota with a baby camel folded up in the back of the pick-up section, driving past. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Why?’ And it is because the baby camel’s mother, who is on parade, cannot bear to be more than a few yards away from her child, so they have to drive the baby near her, sort of like dangling a treat to a cat. And that is my camel fact.
* * *
ALLEGED PROPERTIES OF CAMEL MILK: A LIST
— Good for calming the stomach;
— Good for the immune system;
— Also good for diarrhoea;
— Makes foreigners shit themselves near instantly;
— Anecdotal evidence suggests a sort of half-Viagra dick effect as well;
— Low sugar.
* * *
MORAL QUANDARY
Say you have a camel and it’s really fucking pretty – good hump, small ears, big eyes, beautiful coat – but its lips suck ass. That is its one flaw. Like: this is a really, really pretty camel. But it’s got those thin little I’d-like-to-speak-to-the-manager lips. Got nothing going on in the lip department. It is, for all intents and purposes, lipless. Just lip skin and nothing in between. The lips are AWOL. You know you are entering a camel contest where lip size is a measurement of beauty. But what you got here is just this entirely lipless beast. You cannot win without lips. What do.
SOLUTION
You are Kris Jenner and the camel is your beautiful daughter and you inject it in the lips with silicone. I am serious about this: the King Abdulaziz festival is forced to take a hard line on doping, which includes lip fillers for camels. In future festivals they have plans for a purely anti-doping judging committee. Says Dr Fahd Abdulla Al-Semari, festival organiser, all-round go-to camel don: ‘The point is this, like a sport, you have people who mess up the camels. They use silicone, they cheat. We spotted three cases, so they were removed. It’s very delicate: we now have a special committee to formulate a system on how to prevent these things. Like what happens in some sports where men use drugs, like in the Tour de France, or swimming. So we are serious about this now, it’s a concern for us. So we created a special team.’ Your lipless camel is Lance Armstrong. Your lipless camel is Yulia Efimova. Nothing Is Pure In This World, Not Even Camels.
* * *
Nobody can get my name right, a rare novelty, so I’m asked what my surname is in case it’s easier for them to pronounce. ‘Golby,’ I say, and the group lights up. ‘Gol–bee, gol–bee,’ a young guy who works for the festival says, pointing to his chest. ‘It means “my heart” in Arabic,’ someone whispers. So that is what they call me for the next two days: my heart.
* * *
Like Dubai, Saudi has no scent, and is entirely under construction but studded with great wealth, the way you imagine New York would be one year to the day after an Avengers-style alien attack. In Arabia they drive how you want to drive, if you weren’t curtailed by pesky traffic laws: they overlap and weave like a closely contested Mario Kart race; they straddle lanes and drift aimlessly between them. Wing mirrors are a notion. Right: you know that chase scene, in Matrix: Reloaded, that goes for like 15 minutes and was, for a time, the most expensive car chase ever filmed? That. That is how everyone drives in Saudi Arabia.
* * *
Bedouin culture is something I can get behind. Basically, at the end of every day – or, actually, quite often during the day, when it gets too hot or you straight can’t be arsed with it then you sit with a flask of sweet chai and a golden urn of dates and work your way methodically through both of them – everyone gathers in these tents, extravagantly rugged arrangements in a simple boxy shape, small low cushions lining the walls with a central space in the centre, the low cushions studded by larger, squarer ones that work like tables, and you just sit and eat and the TV is going and you chat shit. I don’t chat shit, obviously; whenever someone enters the tent, kicking their shoes off at the door, they hold up a solemn hand and say ‘salaam alaikum’ – ‘what up, dudes’ essentially – and everyone parrots it back apart from me because no matter how slowly and how many times I am taught how to say it I just cannot seem to contort my mouth and prime my brain to say sa-laam a-lai-koom. But everyone else seems to be having a very fun time, chatting shit, telling long, winding dad jokes, everyone laughing. Someone does an impression of an engine that for me goes on far too long but everyone seems to love. Bedouin.
The guy half-slumped next to me leans over and explains that he is sorry, he doesn’t speak English, he wishes he could. It is fine, I say, please don’t apologise, it’s not like I speak Arabic, come on. But then he takes his phone out and shows me an app on it: if we both speak, slowly, into the microphone, the app will take our words and translate them, and we can have a rough conversation. Big up the future, because this app rules:
how old are you
29
what is your country
england
are you married
you sound like my girlfriend
And the Saudi lads are loving it, loving it, banter is the universal language, there is no doubt about that—
And he asks me how I like Saudi Arabia so far and yes, good, but also I am still annoyed about being held at the airport that one time so I explain through the translator about the visa, the two-hour wait, the fact that the same guy who just stamped my visa went and very slowly checked my passport at airport security some ten yards away, like my dude have you not seen enough of my passport yet, and they are all rolling their eyes and groaning sympathetically as if to say ‘right?’, as if to say, ‘visas’.
I am assured, though, that I am actually relatively lucky, and I am one of the recipients of the new, cuddly- faced vision of the border – up until only a year ago, things were tighter around here, with the religious police (or Hayaa) in full force: they were able to break up same-sex pairings if they didn’t like the look of them, publicly shave men’s heads if they deemed their haircut too inappropriate. In 2012, Hayaa members were accused of causing death by dangerous driving after chasing a vehicle that was playing loud music; their powers were finally stripped after a viral incident last February where a woman was assaulted outside a Riyadh mall. Even here at the camel festival, you’re aware of the quiet, watching hands of enforcement: to enter the festival proper you need to drive through various armed checkpoints; we later cruise past an endless run of barracks that, I’m told, are home to the 1,000 security, police and firemen here to keep the festival in order. There are 30,000 camels here, 1,300 owners. An audience of 400,000 visitors spread over 42 festival days. About one armed guard per 9.5 visitors per day. It feels a bit much.
‘Ah, it’s for the king,’ I’m told, a wave of the hand. King Salman bin Abdulaziz is scheduled to close the ceremony, waving to a plethora of assembled dignitaries: behind me, as the camels parade in the morning, a team of builders furiously saw and drill his VIP stand together, raising with sheer force of will a camel festival out of the sand. When the $30 million collective prizes are handed out at the close of the ceremony, the big wins will go to Prince Sultan Bin Saud bin Mohammed and HRH Prince Abdul Al-Rahman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. I’m back in the tent with the man and the app:
‘We love the system,’ he tells me.
Pause.
‘Sometimes,’ he adds. And the whole tent shakes again with laughter.
* * *
Before I leave here it is my destiny to get on a camel. Camels, I am warned, get up from a sitting position in the most insane way imaginable: back legs stand first, tipping you all the way forward, then the front legs unfold, swinging you back to some form of equilibrium. I am anticipating some sort of waltzy rollercoaster experience, but it’s smoother than that: the camel beneath me is placid, calm despite the great weight above it, walks around the designated camel walking area with a peaceful trot, a kind of louche gallop. There is something very all-seeing about being on a camel, the same way standing up on a bike makes you that bit taller and more omniscient than humans are meant to be: you look down and survey your surroundings, you take in the details, you gaze to the horizon. I have drunk of the milk and seen of the parade and I have not understood camels. I have seen them stand up and I have seen them lie down, I have seen them spit and I have seen them dying. I have seen black camels and I have seen white camels. I have had a thousand identical conversations about camels, and what makes camels good, and why everyone is so bang into camels. I know of camel ears and eyes and lips and humps. I have toured around a camel museum. I have stared at the stars from the camel observatory. I have flown seven hours and driven two into the dry heat of the desert to see as many camels as it is possible to see. I have not understood camels. And now up here, soaring, I get it: camels are just chill, weird, useful little monsters, statuesque ships passing in the desert night, absolutely mad fuckers who love to give milk and meat and life and a form of transport, they love to gently rock up and down, lips flapping, hump steering backwards. I get it now. Camels are sound as fuck. I mean they’re no dog, are they. But they’re still quite good.