The news media were all abuzz this morning with images and videos about the latest adventures of the Google Trekker Camera.  This is the 360 degree view camera that Google sends around the world to create the street view images for Google Earth.  You might see this strange looking camera in your neighborhood.  And of course, legends of the strange things photographed by the Trekker Camera abound.  But now it seems that Google has gone one step further and strapped its camera to the hump of a camel named Raffia to drag the camera around through the shifting sands of Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis, and these are beautiful images.

According to Google spokeswoman Monica Baz the camel was an apt way of documenting the desert. “With every environment and every location, we try to customize the capture and how we do it for that part of the environment…In the case of Liwa we fashioned it in a way so that it goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way.” Ironically for the camel the only thing that it does not photograph is itself. As a result, and if you exclude shadows, there are no selfies in Camelot.

Shades of Lawrence of Arabia, shades of the Three Wisemen, shades of Marco Polo’s expedition to the orient.  I am reminded of a limerick taught to me by a reader and friend forty years ago. AB knows who he is. But that is too risque to repeat here. So we will have to settle for Ogden Nash here:

“The camel has a single hump;
The dromedary , two;
Or else the other way around.
I’m never sure. Are you?”