After the previous chapter, one of you inquired about the horses Demak Pasha and Captain Owais ride. They're Arabians, the breed developed and most suited to life on the Arabian Peninsula. They are usually fairly dark in color--bay, black, chestnut, or grey--but they sometimes have spots. They do not carry "dilution" genes that make for some of the lighter coat colors, though they occasionally look white (technically light grey).
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| Arabian horse enthusiast Carl Raswan, c. 1930 |
Arabians have a fine temperament due to the necessity of living close to people in the desert.
I don't focus much on horses in the story because Nazeem doesn't have one. Camels are better at hauling heavy loads through the desert. Still, Dawud's chapter prompted me to research whether camels or horses would be better for racing against the train.
Horses are faster overall, especially on suitable terrain, but camels are generally faster in the desert, probably because of their feet. Horses have hooves. Camels do not. As you all know, they have feet with two toes. (Thus camels are not kosher, for they do not have split hooves, because they don't have hooves at all. They are, however, halal.)
As you can see from the video, racing camels are actually very fast, so I decided they would be fast enough for Dawud's purposes.
I wanted to know if male or female camels run faster, but couldn't find any camel-racing records. (One mediocre website claimed that such records aren't kept.) According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, however, female camels are favored for racing, and with million dollar prizes on the line, I figure the owners know what they're doing.
The big camel racing countries are the Gulf Coast Emirates and Australia (they've got a lot of fewer in Australia), but of course anywhere there are camels, people will race them.
You may have noticed in the video that the camels no longer have human jockeys, but instead little remotely controlled jockey robots. These are of course lighter and less prone to injury than human jockeys, and cut down on human trafficking of children sold for the purpose of racing camels.
(The UAE and Qatar banned the use of child jockeys >15 years ago, but the sale of desperately poor children like Nazeem into slavery remains a problem in some countries.)
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| Colt 1860 Army revolver, credit Rama |
It seems the Ottomans were purchasing excess American guns after the Civil War. A rifle would be inappropriately long for Dawud's purposes, but Colts were one of the most popular small guns manufactured during the Civil War, so I reason they could have found their way into the desert via the same channels.
Of course Dawud could just as easily have gotten his hands on a British gun, but it looks like the Brits were also buying Colts, so it works either way.
The chapter was named after the American bandit Jesse James (not Team Rocket from Pokemon). I read a book about James and other "wild west" (if you consider Missouri the wild west) bandits several years ago. James also has a link to the US Civil War. Much "banditry" was actually a local, small-scale continuation of the war, with folks on both sides looking to settle old scores. (And, likewise, much of the war was also bandits looking to benefit from the fighting.) Wars are complicated things, without neat and tidy boundaries. But Jesse James isn't actually in this chapter.
The sex-segregation of the train cars is based on a scene in The Ottoman Lieutenant. It's fiction, but I'd be surprised if it's wrong about the trains! It's on Netflix if you like romantic dramas set during WWI.
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