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A few days after, Zarif was asked how he talks to Mohammed. "Mit Munt: with mouth." "Why don't you tell me that with your mouth?" "Weil ig kein Stim hbe: because I have no voice." Does not this answer, as Krall remarks, allow us to suppose that he has other means than speech of conversing with his stable-companion?
After dinner, the experiments begin again, for my host is untiring. First of all, pointing to me, he asks Muhamed if he remembers what his uncle's name is. The horse raps out an H. Krall is astonished and utters fatherly reprimands: "Come, take care! You know it's not an H."
In fact, out of six or seven stallions whom Krall tried to initiate into the secrets of mathematics, he found only two that appeared to him too poorly gifted for him to waste time on their education. These were, I believe, two thoroughbreds that were presented to him by the Grand-duke of Mecklenburg and sent back by Krall to their sumptuous stables.
There is not, therefore, necessarily any simultaneity between the action and the vision; and it is well never to take their statements in this respect literally. The other mistake referred to our dress: Krall and I were in ordinary town clothes, whereas she saw us in those long coats which stable-lads wear when grooming their horses.
Thereupon, as a diversion and a reward, his kind master suggests the extraction of a few square and cubic roots. Muhamed appears delighted: these are his favourite problems: for he takes less interest than formerly in the most difficult multiplications and divisions. He doubtless thinks them beneath him. Krall therefore writes on the blackboard various numbers of which I did not take note.
Another time, I wrote down from his dictation, 'Hanschen has bitten Kama. Like a child seeing its father after an absence, he felt the need to inform me of the little doings of the stable; he provided me with the artless chronicle of a humble and uneventful life." Krall, for that matter, living in the midst of his miracle, seems to think this quite natural and almost inevitable.
A well-to-do Elberfeld manufacturer, Herr Krall, had taken a great interest in Von Osten's labours and, during the latter years of the old man's life, had eagerly followed and even on occasion directed the education of the wonderful stallion.
I opened my mind on the subject to Krall, who at first did not quite grasp what I was asking.
At last, Krall draws a big M on the black-board, whereupon the horse, like one suddenly remembering a word which he could not think of, raps out, one after the other and without stopping, the letters M A Z R L K, which, stripped of useless vowels, represent the curious corruption which my name has undergone, since the morning, in a brain that is not a human brain.
"But," some one might have said, "Krall, who knew that you were coming to Elberfeld, had of course thoroughly rehearsed his little exercise in spelling, which apparently is only an exercise in memory." For conscience' sake, though I did not look upon the objection as serious, I submitted it to Krall, who at once said: "Try it for yourself.
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