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Updated: May 2, 2025
He was indeed the perfect picture of a desert patriarch. He insisted on the travellers accompanying him to his camp, and would hear of no excuses. Ordering Mahomet to have their baggage repacked, he requested them to mount two superb hygeens with saddle-cloths of blue and purple sheep-skins, and they set out with their venerable host, followed by his wild and splendidly-mounted attendants.
We find it going on when Herodotus wrote his History, and the historians of the nineteenth century will have to continue writing of the actions of the parties to it. There seems never to have been a time when it was not old, or a race that was not engaged in it, from the Tartars, who cook their meat by making saddle-cloths of it, to the Sybarites, impatient of crumpled rose-leaves.
It consisted in reality of a troop of more than two hundred horsemen mounted on pure white Nicaean horses, whose bridles and saddle-cloths were covered with bells and bosses, feathers, fringes, and embroidery.
There was the saddlery bazar, where one could buy magnificent trappings for one's Arab steeds, saddle-cloths embossed with gold, bridles of scarlet silk, a single rein which makes you look as if you were managing a horse by a single thread, and bridles of silver and ivory. There was a shoemaker's bazar. How different from a shoe shop in England!
On the box sits a coachman, sometimes in a sheepskin coat; and a footman, a dandy, with a cockade. Well-fed horses in saddle-cloths fly through the frost at the rate of twenty versts an hour; in the carriages sit ladies muffled in round cloaks, and carefully tending their flowers and head-dresses.
Several of them were trimmed and handsomely adorned with quills, the talent of the manufacturer being especially exerted in ornamenting the saddle-cloths. The stirrups were formed of curved pieces of wood, hanging by leather thongs to the primitive saddle. The bridles might more properly be called halters. They consisted of a thong of raw hide, thirty feet in length, called an atscacha.
We rode, as usual, on the high-peaked Moorish saddles, covered with scarlet cloth, such as every Moor uses the stirrup-leathers of twisted scarlet silk, several thick saddle-cloths underneath, the girths never drawn, the saddle only kept from slipping over head or tail by scarlet britching and breastplate. It is impossible to mount unless the stirrup is held.
These were further secured by weaving a few flexible twigs along the top and sides of the framework, thus giving it sufficient stability to support the saddle-cloths and skins with which we covered them.
An ass was brought to him, followed, according to custom, by its colt. The Galileans spread their finest garments upon the back of this humble animal as saddle-cloths, and seated him thereon. Others, however, spread their garments upon the road, and strewed it with green branches. The multitude which preceded and followed him, carrying palms, cried: "Hosanna to the son of David!
The magnificence remained unrivalled in the history of royal conferences. The very troopers wore habits of cloth of gold over their steel, while their embroidered saddle-cloths were fringed with silver bells. Surpassing all others, were the heralds-at-arms of the various individual states which acknowledged Charles as their sovereign, seigneur, count, or duke as the case might be.
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