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The Drinker of the Air PART ONE
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Reading Raswan |
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The Drinker of the Air PART ONE
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"Weal is knotted in the forelocks of noble horses until the day of judgement." Those "fanatics" who breed Arabian horses for purity only -- for the love of seeing the finest blood perpetuated -- judge a horse from its head first. Outstanding among such breeders is Prince Muhammad Ali, of Egypt, from whose breed is this pure Arabian mare. |
IT WAS AN episode at Montaza, in the stables of the Khedive of Egypt, Abbas Hilmi Pasha, in 1911, that immeasurably intensified what was already one of my yourthful interests and made it dominant in my life. I was only nineteen and had not given away my heart. The setting forromance was perfect. Desert sand-dunes; date-palms with heavy bundles of golden and purple fruit; gardens scented with orange, myrtle, hibiscus, bougainvillea; blue sky melting into the azure of the Mediterranean. Murmuring fountains, turtledoves cooing in loftly branches orgliding on white wings to their nestign-places; slender gazelles, with shining black horns, hoofs and eyes, peering from the shrubbery or bounding across the gravel walks. A chateau hedged about by foliage of stately trees, like a pearl among emeralds, andlittle gemlike kiosks scattered here and there among bushes aflame with blossoms. At last, the richly appointed stables. |
 I
TOOK DELIGHT in the great number of fine saddle and
harness horses, mostly of Arabian blood, but I did not see one of those
ideal Arabs that I had admired in thepaintings of European galleries or
in that antique art of sculpture which in the frieze of the Parthenon achieves
an almost unearthly beauty. The horses I was looking at were not precisely
ugly and, when moving about, showed some style of their own and could half
deceive even a seeker after perfection. That I was, but I had thought in
my inexperience that the authentic blood could be found in Aleppo or Damascus.
In Damascus, however, when I had met some Anaza from the interior Arabian
deserts and had taken them to see the horses of my choice, they had only
laughed and dismissed the animals with the comment, "They are city-bred."
I was told by the Egyptian officer who now acted as my guide that these
horses in the Khedive's stables came from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Spain,
France and England. Most of them were Syrian and country-bred.
"At last I realize," I said, supposing myself to have expected to have expected too much, "that, through the ages, artists, in recording their impressions of Arabs, must always have shown them in a highly excited state." "Oh, no," he answered. "I have kept back our real Arabs for the sake of allowing you to compare them with these others. We have only three of the genuine class here, since it is late in the season.The rest have been removed by His majesty's order to the Palace of Kubba, in Cairo."
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| IT APPEARED to me for a moment that the horse was jealously guarded. But I was mistaken. At the entrance to the stable he wheeled and, unchecked, came trotting back to the place where the officer and I were standing. He stood before me. Tingling with pleasure, I touched his muzzle and his forehead. I stroked his mane, his powerful neck, his broad, golden back. I lifted his feet. I felt his muscles and tried to press my hand into the rock-rounded flesh of his croup. I raised an armful of the luxuriant, silky hair of his tail andheld it against my cheek. The sense of his beauty had stirred in me a very profound emotion. I am not ashamed of it. It was the beginning of a love that, besides glorious adventures and most happy days in the company of many noble animals, has brought also hours of tragedy, but has not faltered in all these bygone eighteen years -- an experience to make me wish sometimess in wishful moods that, in a life beyond life, there might be Arabian horses. |
What counts is the spirit of the Arabian horse--its constitution of iron plus the will-power to struggle and to endure in spite of all hardicaps |
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Among orthodox breeders stallions are chosen from the same strain, if possible, as the mare; for by inbreeding the characteristics of the particular strain are brought to the greatest perfection in the progeny. Thus Mahrusa, who, taking her strain from her dam, is a Kuhailah-Jalabiyah, was sired by a Kuhailan-Jalabi. Above is another mare, of perfect type. [According to the Raswan Index, the standing mare is a 1927 photo of Mahroussa by Raswan]
The mare bequeaths the strain-name to the foal. An Arab of noble strain is not black-coated, but, whether it is an iron-gray or white, radiating a silvery light, or a bay, radiating a golden light, there is always the effect of antique luster on gold or silver produced by the under surface of shining, raven-blasck skin.
Two hours after the foaling, Carl R. Raswan make this photograph of an Arabian mare, brought by him to California in 1924, and her baby. Below is an eight-day-old filly being groomed by the Raswan children. Mr. Raswan has spent about eight years among the nomad breeders in the Near East and has examined, thousands of horses there.
Old Persian miniatures bear eloguent testimony to the love of Arbian horses in Persia. Not in Arabia alone but in other Islamic lands was woven through centuries a carpet of legend to put under the feet of the Arab |
FOR HOURS after that unforgetable stallion
was led back to his box-stall, I talked with the Bedouin, who initiated
me into many secrets of the history, the breeding, the strains and the
homeland of Arabs. He had brought this stallion and two others, a bay and
a gray (which I also had a chance to see and include in my heart and soul),
from Central Arabia as a gift from the Amir Ibn Rashid to the Khedive,
who was one of the greatest lovers and breeders of Arabian horses in our
age and who was aided by his brother, Prince Muhammad Ali, my generous
friend, in saving some of the best blood of Arabia.
ONE MORNING six months or so after this visit to Montaza, as I was trotting along an irrigation canal in Lower Egypt, two riders loomed above the horizon. I soon saw that one was a fellah, on a donkey,and the other a Bedouin, on a light chestnut stallion of such quality that I could compare only three horses in the Khedive's stables. I was in the presence of an asil or noble, animal, of purest breeding. There was no doubt of that. His head, with its pyramidal, antelope profile, was fairly short. He tossed it up and down and neighed briefly in high spirits a few times. As his mouth, with its small, firm lower lip, played with the bright-colored tassels of his halter, it revealed teeth of gleaming ivory. His large, thin, wide-open nostrils were like petal tips of a rose or like delicate pink shells. Above the dark fire of his eyes with their long, shining lashes rose high and shieldlike a bold, expressive forehead, bearing a silvery-white new moon and between the horns of the crescent anirregular mark, also silvery-white, like a star. His head was wide between the jaws and had the concave indenture of the whole nasal bone whereby distinguished ancestry is recognized. The curve of the windpipe culminated in a wonderfully arched throat.The contour of the neck resembled an elongated wave, from which floated in brilliant ripples the silken, silvery-red mane. His small, straight, inward-pointing ears quivered like "lilies trembling in flowing water." His whole body swayed, lithe and slender, with supple strength. His breast was deep and majestic, and his sloping shoulders had the characteristic "swimming movement." His back, short, wide and distinctly seamed, was ideal for the saddle. The muscles of the level croup were strong, the secret of his ability to "soar" and "poise," as the Bedouin says. The long tail of fine hair, carried high in a perfect arch, fell to the ground like a heavy, silvery-red veil, tapering and growing lighter at the tip. His thighs, like those of an ostrich, were musclular; his legs, light but cleanly modeled and firm, with elastic pasterns long and strong, and black hoofs as hard as rock. He was of flawless proportions and balance, about fifteen hands high, neither large nor small but above the average Arabian horse, which is about fourteen hands, three inches. His short, fine silky coat shone like a mirror. Looking at him, I understood why Al-Burak, who carried the Prophet to Paradise, and Rukhsh, the famous charger of Rustam, were called "the gleaming horses." |
| GHAZAL, I learned, once the Bedouin and I had
gone through the rite of accepting each other as friends, was the name
of this stallion. He was a six-year-old Saklawi-Jidrani ibn Sudan, of the
most famous strain of those Saklawi ("large flanks") traditionaly
belonging to the Khamsat ur Rasul -- the "Five of the Prophet"--
which are still bred by a few families of the Anaza in absolute purity.
As for the Bedouin, he was Abd al Kadir alAmra, a sheikh of the Wuld Ali
Anaza, of a family related to the great Wahhabi leader Ibn Saud, and from
his Arabian ancestors he had property in Upper Egypt and an interest in
the oases of the Libyan Desert. Partly from his experience in breeding
and partly because of his extensive travels and wide observation, he was
deeply versed in the lore of horses, and I listened with profit to all
he had to say about types and strains.
THIS IS not the history of Ghazal nor of the events that before the end of the day put the camel's-wool rope of his halter into my hand and bestowed on me the name of Nureddin Abd al Aziz, Abd al Kadir's young son, killed only two weeks before. But it would not have been possible for me to write of Arabian horses without at least describing that perfect animal, who epitomized the ideal points of breeding and character, and without recalling the hour of my parting from Abd al Kadir. While I stood near him, before the door of his tent, he fastened on the forehead band of Ghazal's halter a flat silver disk, with a large, sea-green chrysolite in the center and at the rim a deep red inscription in Kufic: "Weal is knotted in the forelocks of noble horses until the day of judgement." Then, having given me the rein and waited while I adjusted the belly-girth, he dressed me with the help of his slaves in a Bedouin costume -- one that had been the property of Nureddin Abd al Aziz. Meanwhile Nafisa, the young man's mother, had come up to us. But, when she saw me standing there in the garments of her dead son, she wept and, bowing slightly, was about to turn away. So I ran to her and, kneeling before her, with downcast eyes I cried, "O mother, bless me!" Then I felt her hands on my turban and on my shoulders and knew that she was pressing her face against the head-covering and her hands against the muslin scarf. Kissing the kerchief, she stepped back and said to me, "Ya Nureddin Abd al Aziz! Ya ibni!-- My son! My God-given son! With you a blessing is granted to our house." BUT THE blessing had been granted perhaps to me; for within a few months, when I was lying injured and helpless under machine-gun fire from Fort Lombardia, in Tripoli, it was Ghazal who carried me from the barbed-wire entanglement and saved my life. Already I had made up my mind to go to Arabia and persuade the Anaza to instruct me -- or perhaps the Mutair and the Harb, who, with a few other Bedouin tribes, share the honor of breeding the genuine Arab. On my recovery, therefore, I left Africa for the Hamad and Nafud deserts of the forbidden peninsula. SINCE THEN I have spent about eight years among the nomad breeders and have traveled thousands of miles in their territory and examined thousands of horses -- 4,351 horses last year, for example, on my third journey, during which for ten months I visited tribe after tribe in Mesopotamia, Syria and Arabia. I have now an almost complete list of the tribes, clans and families that still breed the genuine Arabs. Bedouins almost never part with the genuine blood and do not even show their outstanding animal to strangers. Hence my work requires time and patience. In any circumstances, of course, it would give me pleasure to make diligent search all over the desert for th the authentic strains and individuals. But I am obliged to confess that it was almost heart-breaking last year to see what modern firearms and automobiles and a semisettled mode of life are doing to destroy the old Bedouin ideals and, in consequence, to ruin the priceless Arabian horse. OF THE 4,351 horses I examined, only 14 mares were of absolutely pure strain, and at that rate there can hardly be more than 800 asil horses at present in the whole of Arabia. What with careless mating, first of all, plus soft food and brackish water in the mild climate of the lower altitudes, and what with the use of curb, clumsy saddle and sharp stirrup-shoes, the free and noble horse of the fighting Bedouin must soon be transformed into the slave or pet of the dull peasant in mud village. Gone in a generation or two, I am almost compelled to think, will be the primitive heroic beauty of the Arab's friendship with "the drinker of the air." FOR THIS reason it seems to me essential not only to acquire as many asil horses as possible and to do everything I can to help save the authentic strains but also to collect the extant lore on the subject. Science has traced the Arabian horse beyond the fabulous wild mare that Ismael caught in the desert; yet the legendary records of the Arabs have an imaginative content that makes them worth preserving for their emotional truth. Some of this material exists in Arabic manuscripts, ancient and modern, but much of it may be got only by word of mouth, and pedigrees, though given with absolute fidelity, are never kept in writing. My task, therefore, involves much more than the search for horses. On my third journey I took quantities of notes and copied with my camera more than three thousand manuscript pages, which, as I have leisure, I am translating and working over into usable form. |
| WHERE THE Arab came from is a question often
raised and still not scientifically answered. His five instead of six lumbar
vertebrae and apparent tendency to have fewer than the usual number of
tail vertebrae (sixteen instead of eighteen), his elongated pelvis, his
prominent brain-case, depressed profile below the orbits and tapering,
slender jaw, together with his other special anatomical characters, mark
him, almost beyond doubt, as a distinct species but do not determine his
origin. Various theories once held -- for example, the idea that he came
from Libya -- are untenable. The difficulty with most books on the thoroughbred
horse -- W. Ridgeway's, for example --is that the dates given for the origin
of the Arab and his introduction into Arabia are based on the Bible (which
contains accurate, but of course very little, information about horses)
or on Egyptian records. But recent archaeological finds in Mesopotamia
are alone sufficient to prove the existence of horses in Arabia far in
advance of any Egyptian records. Moreover, the confident assertion of some
writers that there were no horses in Arabia before Mahomet's time, in the
seventh century, is a plain example of ignorance, since our museums and
libraries contain hundreds of documents to disprove such a statement. The
Arabic manuscript pages and inscriptions that Ihave photographed will,
I hope, shed light on the question, and other records will surely be found
in the near future, since Arabia is now being unveiled by historians and
archaeologists.
AT PRESENT there is this undoubted fact to consider, that the best and most typical Arabian horses can be traced to Bedouins who live in the neighborhood of the Nafud or have migrated from there. I personally believe that the cradle of the Arab, as described in the Book of Job and by early Arabian poets, or as I find him today (there is no appreciable change from this classic type), is Central Arabia. The Bedouins say that the original wild Arab lived of old in the red sand desert there, in company with the wild antelope, the ostrich and the ass. THOUGH THE origin of the Arabian horse in Arabia itself is no more to be proved by the traditional records of the Semitic people than by scientific data, those records have poetic value. The Bedouins, who regard themselves as the children of Ishmael, son of Arabham, say that Ishmael caught a wild mare of the kuhl race, so called because her skin was black like antimony around her eyes. The mare, who was in foal when captured, produced a colt, and from these two, through close inbreeding, came the whole Arabian species. The Bedouins at first referred to the horses so produced as "black-skinned antelopes" and later just as "kuhalian"-- a word that even today is used for any pure-bred Arab in the desert, though hundreds of strains, substrains and families have developed and various names have been given to them. THE BEDOUINS say also that, when Nimrod was founding Babylonia, there lived in the Arabian peninsula another ancestor of theirs. Kahtan (Joktan) was his name. He and his tribe, who were raiders, like the present Bedouin, settled in a part of Central Arabia that even yet is called after him, "Kahtan." They were mounted on horseback and fell one day upon a man named Job, carrying away his earthly possessions and killing his people with the sword. The record of it, with the most beautiful poem ever written abut a horse, can be read in the Old Testament in the Book of Job, together with an intimate description of nomadic life, almost the same as it still is. Job himself, however, appears to have possessed no horses among his flocks. In place of the horse God is said to have let him keep his original language, the Arabic, because he had not participated in the building of th the Tower of Babel. THOUGH ISLAMIC history seems at first to present us with a wealth of information about Arabian horses since Mahomet's time, there remain, after it is sifted, only a little gold and much useless matter. What is fabulous and superstitious and vainglorious is so commingled with what is historical that the written word seems less to be relied on than the old nomadic way of memory and verbal transmission -- the legacy handed down from father to son by word of mouth. Yet there are many truthful literary records of the Arabian horse, which are of special value because they could never have originated among the simple nomads of the desert. It took the life of religious leaders and the deeds of Islamic world-conquerors and the wealth and splendor of caliphs, sultans, shahs and padishahs to put under the feet of the noble Arabian steed a new and flowery and most magically beautiful carpet, which will never fade so long as Arabian horses find a place in human hearts. TO ME, the most charming legend about the origin of the Arabs is the story of the foal borne by the wild Arabian mare that Ishmael received from God in compensation for being disinherited by his father. It was this colt, which became crippled when carried all day in a wool-bag, on the back of a camel, that Bedouin traditional history names as the original sire of all Arabian horses. A cynical western critic of the Arabs might say, with contemptuous reference to the hump-backed stallion, "You admit the whole race to be descended from an unsound and defective stock." But the Bedouins speak of this Arab in almost Biblical terms, saying: "God has power to bring the wisdom of men to naught. He can use a cripple to create the most beautiful and perfect." IT IS my opinion that many of the Bedouin traditional records of the Arabian horse were purposely destroyed or remodeled to fit into Islamic history, whether to cause the glory and fame of the Prophet to shine brighter or to give the Arabian horse a share in the glory and fame of the Prophet. There are fine descriptions of horses in the pages of the Koran, especially in the one-hundredth Sura, and, futhermore, in the Hadith, or Sayings of the Prophet. THE ARABIC stories of the creation of the Arabian horse remind us of classic Greek myths, which in similar fashion speak of the productive power of the South Wind or the West Wind. "God said to the South Wind: 'I will make it from thee, for the glory of my holiness, for the debasement of my enemies, out of kindness to those who are obedient to me.' God ordered a handful of the South Wind, which was thickened to a plastic mass. Whereupon Gabriel's spirit took the mass, which had assumed form in the hand of God, and it was a kumait [date-colored] horse. God said: 'Let thy name be "Arabian." The good be bound to thy forelocks, the spoil to thy back. It is given to thee to widen the maintenance of life. I have favored thee above all other beasts. I have made thy possessor thy friend. I have endowed thee with the power to fly without wings, whether it be in pursuit or in flight. I will place upon thy back men who praise and love me and sing hallelujahs to me.' When God had shown to Adam everything that he had created, he said: 'Choose from my creation what thou wilt.' And he chose the horse. Then God spoke: 'Thou hast chosen thy glory and the glory of thy children to endure forever through eons and eons.'" THE ARAB seems inseparable from a "true believer"-- a Moslem, that is -- and it appears that one of the highest awards of God on this earth or in the world to come is the companionship of an Arabian horse. "When thou enterest Paradise," declared Tirmidhi, the Arabian traditionalist, "a ruby-colored winged horse shall meet thee and shall take thee and fly with thee wherever thou wilt." MYTHICAL, BUT how romantic, sounds the statement of Ibn Hisham, the historian, that, by his own father, Mahomet had been quoted to him as saying: "Ishmael, the son of Abraham, was the first being to ride the horse and the first being to speak Arabic (the language of the angels) and to shoot the arrow from the bow. For the love of him, God imported one hundred pure horses from the seacoast, and he pastured them at Mecca." MAHOMET, IT may be noted, did not originally breed pure Arabian horses but acquired them from other sources; that is, directly or indirectly, from the Bedouins of the desert -- often by the roundabout way of Egypt. As an incidental bit of evidence of the vastly important róle of the Arabian horse in human history, it may be observed that the Prophet became the mightiest of conquerors only after ten thousand horsemen from the desert had rallied to his support. Then he defeated with his cavalry provinces that he could not subject before, and later he carried his victorious banner across northern Africa and deep into Europe. THE NAME Al Khamsa, the Five, of which Sheikh Abd al Khadir spoke in giving me Ghazal's pedigree, refers to strains now existing only in theory. But the story, with its traditional place in Bedouin lore, is of interest. The Prophet, it is said, trying to test the intelligence and endurance of the mares that he was using in his raids and desert warfare, kept more than a hundred Arabian horses of finest breeding penned up for four days without a drop of water and yet with a sparkling stream constantly in view. The terrific heat, the dust, the crowded enclosure, the proximity of crystal-pure water, drove the animals almost to desperation. Finally, at a sign from the Prophet, they were released and with thundering hoofs dashed for the stream, trying to outdistance one another in the short space. Suddenly, however, when the first were only a few feet from the murmuring water, the Prophet caused the trumpeters of his troops, who were assembled around him, to sound the call to halt. |
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WE
WALKED over to a building in Moorish kiosk style, and on our approach
a sais led toward us a magnificent chestnut stallion with an iridescent
sheen on his satin coat. What charm and grace in his movements, though
he only walked!How royal a bearing! What style! My heart was filled with
wonder and joy. Deepn within I repeated to myself: "There he is,
the genuine, authentic Arab! I knew -- I always knew -- that somewhere
he existed."As by magnetic power I was drawn to that ideal of
my dreams, but, as I was about to touch him, I noticed a robed figure --
a slender, bearded Bedouin. He pushed against me as he silently strode
past, and I stopped, uncertain. He seemed to belong to the Arabian horse
as much as the date-palm does to the sand-dune, and he led the stallion
away, not by a halter (the sais had unsnapped the wool-woven leader-line
from the broad silver chain that attached it tothe white wool head-strap),
but by mere soft words.
