Dragon beast
History says that nations who had no horses used to be terrified at the first sight of horsemen, and cites the instances of Peru and Mexico when Empires collapsed in superstitious fear. It seems quite natural then that the first mention of the horse in China should call him Dragon-Beast. He was not really formidable, being only a Dun pony carrying no doubt the good Mongolian pack apparel which consists of a saddle, and a detachable cargo rack, the oldest rigging known. His cargo was a lodestone, a rock of magnetic iron which served the Chinese Emperor as a compass. When the pony wanted to go west, and the magnet insisted on north his celestial majesty probably saw a jolly good bucking match.
The adventurers
From China to the Atlantic, and from the northern Taiga to the Indian ocean the old world was threaded all across with pack trails snaking from water to water over the deserts and pastures, the forests and the hills. Except in the very dry districts where camels, asses and mules were employed for transport, the Dun ponies did all the carrying over-land. From China to Europe was a three years' journey, not because of the distance but by reason of the robbers who made the trail unsafe. At each market town the packtrain captains waited, perhaps for months, until a caravan assembled sufficiently large to undertake the journey. There were periods when great Tartar Caans controlled the whole of Asia north of the Himalaya, together with the grass land known now as European Russia. These monarchs from Zenghis to Kublai and later had post trails with post horses, and horses in relay for ambassadors and despatch riders bearing a golden tablet of office. Old Kublai for example was busy building Pekin when he sent the Polo brothers as envoys, riding post with the golden tablet, to visit the Pope in Rome and ask for a batch of priests to teach him the Christian faith. For years young Marco Polo, nephew of these merchants, rode post as envoy, visiting every realm in Asia. Very different were the ramblings on the pack trails of that rare scamp Fernão Mendes Pinto who in the sixteenth century worked as a slave on the Great Wall of China, travelled with marching armies, and as a fugitive tramp found his way by mysterious Lhassa, to the coasts of further India. Another colossal journey was that in the eighteenth century of Vitus Bering the Dane with his Russian trappers, and Stellar the German naturalist trekking on horseback to the sea of Okhotsk. There they built a ship, and sailed in search of the mysterious straits of Anian leading through Meta Incognita to the Atlantic. They found America, but were wrecked at the tail end of the Aleutians. The surviving trappers built a ship and loaded her with sea-otter skins. These they sold in Pekin for wealth beyond dreams of avarice, and so returned riding as rich men home to their native Russia.
It was in the days of Queen Elizabeth that English envoys and merchants found their way by water and the trail of the Dun pony from the White Sea to Persia and on even to Goa on the Indian Coast.
The trail of the Dun horse always led to adventure. Daring traders went to swap gems for silk at the Court of the great Mogul, or sold white ladies of the Caucasus to Haroun al Raschid down in Bagdad, or to Suliman the Magnificent at Stamboul, or offered purple shell-fish dyes of Tyre to tempt the young Prince Siddatha, or came from the East with gold and frankincense and myrrh and laid them at the feet of a Child in Bethlehem, or journeyed from Sweden with swords for the Prophet of Islam.
III. THE BAY HORSE OF AFRICA.
The Bay horse of Africa
Apart from the sacredness of the Old Testament as dealing with the origin of a religion, we may, without offence to fellow Christians, read this collection of Hebrew books as the secular history of an able but unholy people.
Israel