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The horses are taken back to their racks and the men separate, wishing one another the inevitable Mahlzeit. As he walks with me along the quays of the black and muddy Wupper, Krall says: "It is a pity that you did not see Zarif in one of his better moods. He is sometimes more startling than Muhamed and has given me two or three surprises that seem incredible.
I therefore took from a table a list containing several problems, all different and all equally unpleasant looking, covered up the solutions, asked Krall to leave the stable and, when alone with Zarif, copied out one of them on the black-board.
Mohammed and Zarif for Zarif's progress was almost equal to that of his fellow-pupil, though he seems a little less gifted from the standpoint of higher mathematics-Mohammed and Zarif in this way reproduce the words spoken in their presence, spell the names of their visitors, reply to questions put to them and sometimes make little observations, little personal and spontaneous reflections to which we shall return presently.
There was therefore, at that moment, not a human soul on earth who knew the figures spread at the feet of my companion, this creature so full of mystery that already I no longer dare call him an animal. Without hesitation and unasked, he rapped out correctly the number formed by the cards. The experiment succeeded, as often as I cared to try it, with Hanschen, Mohammed and Zarif alike.
People, for instance, prepared a certain number of questions and put them in sealed envelopes. Then, on entering the presence of the horse, they would take one of the envelopes at random, open it and write down the problem on the black-board; and Mohammed or Zarif would answer with the same facility and the same readiness as though the solution had been known to all the onlookers.
We are amazed that Mohammed or Zarif should recognize the picture of a horse, a donkey, a hat, or a man on horseback, or that they should spontaneously report to their master the little events that happen in the stable; but it is certain that our own dog is incessantly performing a similar work and that his eyes, if we could read them, would tell us a great deal more.
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?
He will certainly never rival Muhamed, for instance, who is the arithmetical prodigy, the Inaudi, of horses; but he is a valuable and living proof that the theory of unconscious and imperceptible signs, the only one which the German theorists have hitherto seriously considered, is now clearly untenable. I have not yet spoken of Zarif.
Von Osten left Kluge Hans to him by will; on his own side, Krall had bought two Arab stallions, Mohammed and Zarif whose prowess soon surpassed that of the pioneer.
But in the presence of other witnesses the horses performed more startling exploits which broke down even more decisively the barrier, which is undoubtedly an imaginary one, between animal and human nature. One day, for instance, Zarif; the scamp of the party, suddenly stopped in the middle of his lesson. They asked him the reason. "Because I am tired."
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