The camel, scientists tell us, developed its hump through living near the North Pole. It lived off the fat in the winter, when the birch trees that also used to live there lost their leaves.
This explains a lot that has been niggling me about the so-called real world. Why is the camel’s coat so warm? Why are its feet so broad, like snow-shoes?
The North Pole and its environs were clearly the workshop where many much-loved creatures were put through their paces before being let loose on the savannah. The giraffe, for example, enjoyed a clear evolutionary advantage in being able to keep its head above the deepest snow-drift.
The porcupine formerly caught fish by diving backwards into ice-holes and spearing them on its spines. The zebra’s stripes resemble nothing so much as thin snow, blown over a black expanse of ice on the water. You get the idea.
If these creatures were to be distributed from the Ngorogoro Crater to the borders of Crim Tartary, the North Pole was a very good starting point. They just had to walk south.
I can see only one difficulty in this general theory of animal design. It is that the camel belongs to the dignified variety of beast only from our point of view. I don’t mean that it looks dignified, though it undeniably does. A camel could, with no difficulty at all and very little rehearsal, understudy Dame Helen Mirren in her starchiest royal mood.
No, the camel is dignified in the Bagehotian sense. Walter Bagehot divided the British constitution into two: the dignified and the efficient (though he might have put some elements, the monarch included, under the wrong category).
To us in Britain, a camel is of no use whatever but to look at. In the days when we had zoos (along with indoor smoking and £sd), we would go and look at them there. At the same time we would take a dekko at the giraffe sticking his head out of the upper part of the half-door of the Giraffe House designed by Decimus Burton. We adjusted our crinolines and went for a ride on an elephant. Would you believe it? Riding on an animal, and a dignified one at that.
But to the people who live alongside camels in the countries where they now have right of abode, the animal belongs to the efficient side of fauna. They are so efficient that they provide milk and meat and transport and leather, and hair for John the Baptist and bookies’ clerks to make coats out of. They are part of the family.
Not so the giraffe, which fits unhappily into a tent, still less the porcupine, which makes an unsatisfactory beast of burden.
Now, it is clear that the efficient animals with which we have grown up in this grassy and pleasant land were not products of an Arctic environment. A cow in the snow sticks out like a sore thumb, looks unhappy and dreams of grass until it falls into a numb senselessness and joins its bovine ancestors on the plains of heaven. Same grass problem for sheep. Pigs feel the cold.
So the working hypothesis must be that only dignified animals, not efficient animals, evolved in the Arctic, that cradle of diversity.
The anomalous camel, dignified to us, efficient to Arabs, is an exception only because the Bedouin too must have developed in the Arctic. That is why they clothe themselves in thick robes from head to foot. Their affinity with oases must once have been a relationship with holes in the ice, for which they would depend for life.
My only remaining suspicion is about the whole Arctic camel theory having been put forward by scientists from Canada, a nation known for its friendly attitude to northern wastes. I’d like a second opinion from scientists from the Empty Quarter.