The Youngest Camel — Story, Setting & Ideas

(4 User reviews) 714

In Category - Childrens Adventures

Authors: Boyle, Kay, 1902-1992, Kredel, Fritz, 1900-1973 [Illustrator] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2021 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Animals -- Juvenile fiction; Voyages and travels -- Juvenile fiction; Camels -- Juvenile fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 22,012

Reading time 96 min

Text sections 10

The Youngest Camel — Story, Setting & Ideas can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 22,012 words, 1 hr 36 min estimated reading time, and 10 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 21.4 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Animals -- Juvenile fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #64988

Kay Boyle's 1939 children's novel follows a young camel on his first caravan journey, where his poetic sensibility and curiosity lead him into encounters with vultures, a lost sense of direction, and a struggle between truth and deception in the desert.

Editorial Edition Score 4.7/5

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Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
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Edition quality

File: pg64988

Read the Text

With illustrations by FRITZ KREDEL

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY 1939

COPYRIGHT 1939, BY KAY BOYLE

_Published August 1939_

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOOKS ARE PUBLISHED BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_For Pegeen, Bobby, Apple-Joan, Kathe, and Clover Vail_

“_Now we have brought you to the pathway between the winds._” Frontispiece

_The little camel said nothing at all, but simply followed in her footsteps_ 22

_He lay there very meekly on one side_ 28

_And then they flew off, their legs floating on the air behind them_ 44

“_It’s much wiser to be polite to everyone I meet, because one never knows._” 54

_The little camel took another uncertain step towards the tent_ 68

The beginning of the caravan’s trip was made through lovely country, through regions in which flowers such as tea roses and white and purple iris bloomed. When the caravan came through villages, boys ran out barefoot and half-naked to sell fruit to the travelers: baskets of peaches, pears, and melons. All the forty camels wore bells, each one several little silver-tongued bells attached to the harness he wore around his neck. The youngest camel was the only one who did not carry a bell, nor a load on his back. This was the first trip he had ever made across the desert and he followed close behind his mother. As long as she was there before him, he felt quite pleased with himself and not at all fearful of all the sights he saw.

After several days the caravan, like every other caravan that took this route, entered the badlands. Here the older camels fell into sudden rages and spat if anyone approached them. If the camel drivers jerked their nose cords, they flung their legs about and tottered as if they were about to faint. Now and then, towards sundown, when the hour to halt seemed near, they screamed aloud like humans. But the camels grew quieter as soon as the desert began and they felt their feet deep in the hot slipping sand.

The early mornings were now a clear icy blue, but as the day advanced the heat blazed up as if a fire were sweeping across the heavens towards them. The youngest camel didn’t mind how hot it was and he had such a good opinion of his own strength that he thought he could never possibly get tired. He came skipping and jumping along behind his mother, playing games with himself and laughing out loud when the dry sand ran swift as water between his toes. But when his mother complained of the terrible heat and the long way they had to go, he lifted his soft dark eyes and looked at her long legs before him, and her tail, and he thought: I love her. I love her elbows with the hair worn off them, like the old carpet the snake charmer sits on in the market place; I love the way her hump slumps when she has no more water in it, and I love the way her tail is eaten by the moths because she forgot to put it in camphor once about fifty years ago.

He was a very poetic young camel and rather musical besides. He had a beautiful singing voice, and in the evenings when they halted at an oasis he liked to play the harp and sing to her. Most of his songs were about himself and his own beauty and grace, but sometimes at night his songs were so tender in his love for her that she had to rise from her knees and break off great leaves from the banana trees and dry the tears from her aging face.

On the fifteenth night they halted at an oasis where the poplars and mimosas grew in great profusion, and where hares and antelope moved shyly in the cool green gorges. The stars were sprinkled out as fine as salt across the bluish night sky. The youngest camel lay close beside his mother in the moist grasses, and she said to him:--

“Flower of my heart, this trip you have followed close beside me, for you are my baby still, but soon you must prepare yourself for what will surely come. Perhaps when we reach the end of our journey you will be taken from me, and from then on you will travel with strange camels, carrying a load of your own.”

“A baby?” said the youngest camel in surprise, feeling a little annoyed. “Me, a baby?”

“Yes,” said his mother sadly, “and so, my earliest leaf, you will have to undergo the ordeal of loneliness.”

Continue Reading →

The youngest camel begins his first caravan journey without a bell or a load, following his mother through flowered regions and villages where boys sell fruit. The early passages establish a contrast between the caravan's orderly progress and the camel's playful, self-assured skipping. But the tone shifts when the caravan enters the badlands: older camels spit, scream, and totter, and the heat blazes like a fire. The youngest camel's initial confidence—he thinks he can never get tired—is tested as his mother complains of the heat and the landscape turns hostile.

Boyle's prose moves between lyrical description and sharp, almost comic menace. The vultures Annie and Mabel, who appear after the camel becomes lost, speak with a matter-of-fact cruelty that undercuts the pastoral opening. Their conversation about the sun's unreliable direction and their frank assessment of the camel's meatiness introduces a tension between innocence and predatory reality that runs through the excerpts.

The Unreliable Sun and the Loss of Orientation

The vultures' claim that the sun changes direction daily—"yesterday it was going from north to south, just for the fun of it, and today ... it's going from east to west"—strips the camel of his last navigational certainty. This moment crystallizes a pattern in the excerpts: fixed points (the mother, the caravan, the sun) prove unstable. The camel's earlier confidence in his own strength and his poetic compositions gives way to a desperate attempt to write a letter to his mother in verse, but he finds that "nothing sounded right to him, neither the sonnet form, nor rondos, nor madrigals." The loss of poetic fluency mirrors his physical disorientation.

Boyle uses the sun not as a symbol of constancy but as a capricious actor. The camel's education is not just about survival but about learning that the world does not conform to his expectations—a lesson reinforced by the vultures' casual dismissal of truth-telling: "It would have been better for your sake if you hadn't told the truth this time."

Voices of Predation and the Failure of Poetry

The vultures Annie and Mabel speak in a colloquial, almost domestic register—"My name's Annie and my sister's name is Mabel"—that makes their predatory intent more unsettling. They discuss the camel's meat with the same practicality they apply to slicing a hare's heart "into neat roast-beef-like portions." Their laughter, described as "chortling," follows the camel as he flees, and the sound becomes a marker of his vulnerability.

In response, the camel turns to poetry, but his attempts at sonnets, rondos, and madrigals fail. The letter he composes mixes self-reproach ("I've made a fool of myself with every bird that flies") with a poignant closing couplet: "Love, invisible it's true, / Still has the shape and smell of you." This line, the most lyrical in the excerpts, suggests that poetry remains a fragile anchor even when it cannot save him. The absence of his harp—"the fact that he did not have his harp with him made the biggest difference"—underscores how his artistic identity depends on external tools now lost.

The Caravan as a System of Sound and Silence

The opening description of the caravan emphasizes sound: all forty camels wear "several little silver-tongued bells attached to the harness." The youngest camel is the only one without a bell, a detail that sets him apart from the collective rhythm. Later, when the older camels scream "like humans" at sundown, the noise becomes a sign of distress rather than order. The camel's own voice—his laughter, his poetry, his scream of terror—alternates with silence: he "said nothing at all, but simply followed in her footsteps" early on, and after fleeing the vultures he walks quietly, hoping to calm his heart.

This pattern of sound and silence reflects a broader tension between belonging and isolation. The caravan's bells create a communal identity, but the youngest camel's lack of a bell marks him as an individual—one who must find his own way when lost. The vultures' cackling replaces the caravan's music, and the desert offers no reassuring chime.

Readers attentive to Boyle's language will notice how she embeds philosophical questions—about truth, art, and survival—within a seemingly simple animal adventure. The camel's poetic aspirations are not whimsical decoration but a central thread: his failure to compose satisfactory verse is as significant as his physical peril. The excerpts leave the camel's fate unresolved, but the tensions they establish—between trust and deceit, lyricism and brute fact, the caravan's order and the desert's chaos—give the story its distinctive edge. Approach the text as a fable that resists easy moralizing, where even the sun cannot be relied upon.

In The Youngest Camel, the desert’s silence teaches how a lone voice—even a misstep—can become its own truth. Years later, I found that same stubborn, quiet seeking in The quest of the Silver Swan: A land and sea tale for boys — A Closer Reading, though one sails on water and the other on sand. Both felt like old friends, patient with their secrets.