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If not for the long arm of a cement factory’s jetty reaching into the sea and windmills on the horizon, this scene could have taken place generations ago. Others stop and roll in the shallows, kicking and squirming like dogs rolling in stink. Some stop and lift their tails, volleying golf-ball-sized turds into the water. At the water’s edge, the kharais slip on the slick clay. One or two herders, known as maldharis, tend each group of kharais, guiding the animals across common lands and forest reserves to food or water, though these camels seem to know exactly where they’re headed. With bellies bulging after several days of feeding, the camels before us are now returning to the mainland to drink. The animals munch mangroves and other salty fare along the mainland but also regularly swim up to three or four kilometers into the Arabian Sea to access island groves. This is the kharai camel, a breed unique to this wedge of the world, named after the local word for “salty.” Its diet is dominated by the leaves of mangroves-salt-tolerant plants that, like the camels, straddle the line between terrestrial and marine. A yearling, with a goofy tuft of long hair flopping over its small hump like a bad set of ’80s bangs, zigzags behind. The adults paddle purposefully past, just their heads and the very tips of their single humps still dry. Up to his waist in water as warm and milky as chai, he chants “he, he, he,” directing the animals to the deepest trench. Because of details lost in translation, and the fluid way people here seem to materialize and then disappear, I only realize the herd’s owner is on board the boat when he hoists his bunchy white dhoti and slips over the gunwale. Without hesitation, they stream into the sea, this time paddling toward us down a channel separating the mainland from a cluster of islands.

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And then the full herd emerges-an amorphous mass of beige legs and necks. We wait, stuck in the shallows just a few meters from where we left. But when there’s little rain, they return to the mainland every few days for water. At times, kharais may stay on coastal islands for months at a time. “Madame,” he then shouts over his shoulder, “there are 100 coming!”Ī herd of kharai camels wades and swims through a tidal channel in the Indian district of Kachchh. My translator, perched on a heap of fishing nets on the boat’s deck, confers with a stranger beside him. On knobby knees, they proceed across a broad, salt-encrusted plain. The first two camels glide across the channel, departing a low-slung island half a kilometer from our bow, and slowly rise at the mainland shore. But here, along the coastal fringes of Gujarat, India, the ships of the desert actually take to the sea. Its ability to stroll across a blazing arid landscape with a teetering load strapped to its back and not a single drop of water crossing its frothy lips for days is so legendary that the camel is widely known as the ship of the desert.

In my mental archives, the camel has long been housed in a box stacked neatly on a shelf and left unexamined. Through the glare, four strange, dark shapes break the water’s surface-two heads, two humps. Article body copyįrom the deck of a wooden fishing boat adorned with saffron, orange, and green, I squint at the point where heat waves merge with the tidal channel and blur the horizon like a greasy handprint on glass. Listen now, download, or subscribe to “Hakai Magazine Audio Edition” through your favorite podcast app. This article is also available in audio format.

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Stream or download audio For this article Septem| 6,900 words, about 35 minutes Share this article

Photo by Shanna Baker Where Camels Take to the Sea In Gujarat, India, a special breed of camel is not constrained by land-but cannot escape the many forces of change. In the Indian state of Gujarat, a special breed of camel moves between land and sea.