Camels hate downhill work, especially when loaded, and fall unless told not to in a speech they understand, in that respect strangely like children.
You had to look out in the dark, too, for the teeth of the camel behind, because they don't love the folk who drive them headlong into gorges full of ghosts, and one man's thigh or elbow makes as easy biting as the next.
Camels are no man's pets, and there is no explaining them.

The fools will graze contentedly with shrapnel and high explosives bursting all about them, but go into a panic at the sight of a piece of paper in broad daylight.

And when they think they see ghosts in the dark they act like the Gadarene swine, only making more noise about it.
I wouldn't have been the lady Ayisha going down some of those dark places for all the wealth of ancient Bagdad.

Her _shibrayah_ pitched and rolled like a small boat in a big sea, and whenever a rock leaned out over the narrow trail, or a scraggy old thorn branch swung, it was by a combination of luck and good carpentry that she was saved from being pitched down under the following camel's feet.

Whoever made that _shibrayah_ could have built the Ark.
But we came down through one last terrific gorge on to a level plain, where the camel-thorn grew in clumps and the heat radiating from the hills was like the breath from an oven door behind us.