Nomad Stories – The Magician’s Curse Of The White Camel
I am Lazrag, the white eyed camel.
My beautiful eyes are my curse. My name comes from “zrag”, translated by nomads language as the bright white colour of a cloud. I got this name because of the white circle inside each one of my eyes. White spots can also be found on some parts of my body like my tummy and my feet.
My colour is a combination between white and my natural colour. This is not everything about me, because my story and the story of camels of my type is a bit sad.
I am a sort of hybrid type of camel and I have some disabilities. I am deaf and dumb but some white camels are only deaf. I can not produce any kind of sound or hear anything and rely just on my weak sight. When I was a baby I sometimes got lost or separated from my mum because I went off playing with other babies from other packs and then I get lost.
In my family, my mum is a white eyed camel the same as me. Our communication is very hard and we are highly expected to go through a very hard time at the beginning. Because neither one of us is capable of hearing the other, we keep on walking all over around the camel packs searching and crying for each other. But nobody will notice that because we are voiceless and deaf.
The world sems blind to see or understand our situation. The fairy tale of becoming reunited again with my beloved mum would never have been achieved unless we followed an instinctive behavioural strategy. What I did was to go back to the last place where I sucked milk and my mum would do the same. Then we would meet each other at the place. We are able to remember the last place I drank milk in even if it is a whole day’s walk from where we realised that we had lost each other.
Nomads used to call a stupid or a naïve person, lazrag based on the symbolism of the white eyed camel because the personality characteristics of this type of camel is that they are very trusting and friendly. And they never like walking on their own, due to their hearing disabilities they are highly in need of friends. When they are very small their survival is connected to the spirit of the group. In addition to the fact that they can be trained easily without much effort demanded from the trainer. Rarely, zrag, the white colour on the eyes can be to just one eye. In this case the camel can hear but not speak or vice versa.
A legend says that there was a peaceful holy man hiding far away in a lush valley in the middle of the nowhere of the desert and the man was hiding because he was afraid of his tribe which dominated that Sahara region. In the past the man was a member of the tribe but because he was accused of practicing some kind of magic upon somebody he had to leave before the tribe killed him. At that remote valley, the magician had been living alone in peace for years, away from humans and he had promised himself to share water with every animal that came to the valley. The man made a well and had been watering animals whenever they joined him. One day, a lost and thirsty camel arrived to the wall looking for water. But the man noticed the symbol of his tribe on the camel, the tribe that wanted to kill him. The magician worried that his tribe would discover his refuge if he watered the thirsty camel. So even though the man provided the thirsty camel with water he asked the camel to promise him not to come again nor to show the well to that tribe’s camels. Because the tribe would track their camels and they would come across his refuge home next to the secret well.
But the camel broke his promise and he brought more camels of the tribe to the secret well and in return the magician cursed him with white eyes forever.
This is my story, so if you see me when you are on your desert trek with Walking with Nomads, please give me some love and attention because I really am the sweetest of all camels.
