Honours are but a shadow that fades away:
But true friends are a treasure that remains.
He who hath written these lines with a hand which shall one day be withered in death, is your friend, the pauper in the presence of Allah.
SID-EL-HADJ, ABD-EL-KADER, BEN-MAHHYEDDIN.
Damascus, end of Deul-Kada 1274 (end of August 1857).
P. S. For the better understanding of our correspondence, permit me to instruct you on one point. The word ferass is not exclusively applied to the female of the horse, as is customary in Algeria—it indicates the male as well as the female. If a mare be particularly alluded to, it is necessary to say a female ferass; and in like manner if the allusion be to a horse, a male ferass is the proper phrase. Such is the way with the true Arabs (Arabes-es-sahh); strictly speaking, the mare is called hadjra and the horse hossan.
The reader of this curious document will doubtless have remarked the singular admixture of legendary anecdotes with snatches of natural history sometimes true, sometimes fabulous after the manner of Pliny and Aristotle, and all of it under the dominion of a religious sentiment. It is history as written by Orientals and likewise by the Western Arabs; for both the one and the other, until now outlawed as it were from progress by their forced or voluntary exclusion from the intellectual movement going on in Europe, are still, so far as science and literature are concerned, no farther advanced than their ancestors of Bagdad or Granada.
Now, it is a remarkable fact that the more learned an Arab may be, the more are his writings imbued with that fancifulness which, for a reader accustomed to the preciseness of our European style, needs to be cleared of its poetical mysteriousness and constructed afresh, before it can be reduced to the character of a document possessed of any historical or scientific worth in the sense we usually give to those words. Thus, at first sight, the letter we have just perused is nothing more than a fragment detached from an Oriental tale. There are, nevertheless, lurking within it incontestable truths, and from beneath the exaggerations and symbols of tradition may be gathered information of a kind not wisely to be despised. Here especially is it the letter that killeth while the spirit giveth life—let us then seek for the spirit beneath the letter.
God created the horse out of the wind, symbol of fleetness, which, in the eyes of an Arab, is the first quality of a courser. The poets of Greece were inspired by the same idea. It was the wind that impregnated the mares of Thessaly, the swiftest of ancient times; and it may be that those mares were introduced into Greece from Syria, or Arabia, together with the fabulous pedigree assigned to them by the poets of both countries. If this were the case, and here history is in accord with tradition, the Arabian horses must have been, what they still are on their native soil, the fleetest and best in the world.