But Mohammed, after giving his master a hearty kiss, still seems to be hesitating. Then Krall, to put him on the right track observes that the first letter of my name is the same as the first letter of his own. Mohammed strikes a K, evidently thinking of his master's name. 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. He is told that this is not correct. He seems to agree, gropes about a little and writes, M A R Z L E G K. Krall repeats my name and asks which is the first letter to be altered. The stallion marks an R.
"Good, but what letter will you put instead?"
Mohammed strikes an N.
"No, do be careful!"
He strikes a T.
"Very good, but in what place will the T come?"
"In the third," replies the horse; and the corrections continue until my patronomic comes out of its strange adventure almost unscathed.
And the spelling, the questioning, the sums, the problems are resumed and follow upon one another, as wonderful, as bewildering as before, but already a little dimmed by familiarity, like any other prolonged miracle. It is important, besides, to notice that the instances which I have given are not to be classed among the most remarkable feats of our magic horses. Today's is a good ordinary lesson, a respectable lesson, not illumined by flashes of genius. 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."
Another time, he answered:
"Pain in my leg."
They recognize and identify pictures shown to them, distinguish colours and scents. I have made a point of stating only what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears; and I declare that I have done so with the same scrupulous accuracy as though I were reporting a criminal trial in which a man's life depended on my evidence.
But I was practically convinced of the truth of the incidents before going to Elberfeld; and it was not to check them that I made the journey. I was anxious to make certain if the telepathic theory, which was the only one that I considered admissible, would withstand the tests which I intended to apply to it. I opened my mind on the subject to Krall, who at first did not quite grasp what I was asking. Like most men who have not made a special study of the questions, he imagined that telepathy meant above all a deliberate and conscious transmission of thought; and he assured me that he never made any effort to transmit his and that, for the most part, the horses gave a reply which was the exact opposite of what he was expecting. I did not doubt this for a moment; in fact, direct and deliberate transmission of thought is, even among men, a very rare, difficult and uncertain, phenomenon, whereas involuntary, unpremeditated and unsuspected communications between one subconsciousness and another can no longer be denied except by those who of set purpose ignore studies and experiments that are within the reach of any one who will take the trouble to engage in them. I was persuaded therefore that the horses acted exactly like the "tipping-tables" which simply translate the subliminal ideas of one or another of those present by the aid of conventional little taps. When all is said, it is much less surprising to see a horse than a table lift its foot and much more natural that the living substance of an animal rather than the inert matter of a thing should be sensitive and susceptible to the mysterious influence of a medium. I knew quite well that experiments had been made in order to eliminate this theory. 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. But was it really unknown to their subconsciousness? Who could say for certain? Tests of this kind require extraordinary precautions and a special dexterity; for the action of the subconsciousness is so subtle, takes such unexpected turns, delves in the museum of so many forgotten treasures and operates at such distances that one is never sure of escaping it. Were those precautions taken? I was not convinced that they were; and, without pretending to decide the question, I said to myself that my blissful ignorance of mathematics might perhaps be of service in shedding light upon some part of it.
