Night Journey by Camel

Except for some twinkling stars in the sky, it was almost pitch dark on the road before and after the cart, lonely, deserted and silent but for the sound 0f the bell hung around the camel's neck as the animal plodded along pulling the cart down the often bumpy desert highway. The cart, a flat platform built above huge wheels with rubber tyres, was piled high with sacks containing jute bags and bundles of bamboo. Such cargoes were of no value to robbers who were wont to stop loaded carts such as this in the dead of night on the highway and make away with their cargoes for a quick cash trade for them at a nearby village.

A tarpaulin had been spread over the cargoes and Mir Jhan, the cart driver, was curled up fast asleep on top of it, leaving the camel up in front to make the journey using its instinct as it had always done for more that two decades on this same road from Karachi to Hyderabad.

Mir Jhan would wake up just before dawn at a watering place, get down off the cart, feed the camel and then perform his morning prayers, a routine he had followed all the years he had been on the road.

He would then join his fellow cart drivers at the same place for a light breakfast of leaven bread and beans. He would take the opportunity to exchange the latest news with his friends. An hour later, he was on the road again as the sun rose in the east where his destination, the town of Hyderabad, lay and where he would discharge his cargoes and take on a new load of cooking pots for his journey onward to Quetta where he lived with his wife and daughter.

Mir Jhan recounted to me the details of his travel all over Pakistan when he stopped over to visit his nephew, Rehman, who was working as a houseboy with me at Karachi. His was an interesting life full of adventure and trials involving highway robberies, sand storms and invasions of locusts that could blacken the whole sky. His descriptions of Hyderabad, Multan, Lahore, Peshawar and the Khyber Pass reminded me of Kim's wandering in this part of the world as told by Kipling.