Sarah Sanders takes the chestnut stallion around the riding arena. Yielding to almost imperceptible pressure of her leg against his side, he trots across the ring, left legs crossing over the right as he moves sideways and forward at once. Then she brings ibn Jalam’s head to the right and presses lightly with her right leg, and he steps to the left. “It’s physics,” she calls over her shoulder. “My weight shifting and me looking at where I want to go is what helps tell him how to move.”
A visitor, Hussain Abulfaraj, nods, watching intently as Sanders, with no apparent word or gesture, brings the horse from a gallop to an abrupt halt. Both hands are raised high above her head. Her body stays with his, no jolt, no recoil.
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Abulfaraj smiles.
He was born in Ames, Iowa, where his parents were university professors, and he’s just finished a Ph.D. in classical Arabic poetry at Indiana University. Soon he’ll take a position on the faculty of King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. But he’s intensely interested in the purebred horses of Bedouin descent.
“Our wealth is our oil wells,” he says, “but our treasure is our horses.”
DB ibn Jalam, like Abulfaraj, is of Saudi ancestry, but he lives on a 300-acre farm near Freeburg, Illinois. The “DB” indicates that he is a desert-bred Arabian; “ibn Jalam” means that he is the son of Jalam. But it’s ibn Jalam’s great-grandfather who started this story.
That horse, along with many of his stablemates, were brought to this country from Saudi Arabia in the 1950s. Their travel papers were authorized by King Abdulaziz ibn Saud himself. Had DNA testing existed, it would have revealed a straight line from the expats to the Bedouin horses that galloped across the desert before King Solomon was born.
Today, there are more horses from ibn Jalam’s family bloodline in the States than there are in Saudi Arabia—but Abulfaraj wants to bring the line back in its ancestral land. “Our wealth is our oil wells,” he says, “but our treasure is our horses.”
And so he has searched stable after stable, visiting 40 or so facilities claiming to have desert-bred Arabians, and he’s checked their DNA.
He’s found no bloodlines this pure.
Rodger Davis leans against the arena gate, a thumb hooked in a jean pocket as he watches the demo. Lean and cowboy tough, he has electric blue eyes that have squinted at horizons most people never see.
When Abulfaraj explains his mission, Davis’ mind reels: Could this be his dream come true? After spending 40 years breeding these very special horses, will he see somebody finally acknowledging and appreciating them? They aren’t Thoroughbreds; they aren’t even what most people call Arabians. They’re a breed unto themselves. And their number is dwindling.
After the ride, one of Davis’ stable hands leads ibn Jalam back to his stall. “If I accidentally shift my weight a little or breathe hard, he knows it and responds,” she says, so in love with the horse that she’s bursting with revelations Davis knows all too well. “I’ll feel him getting ready to do a maneuver when I’m just thinking about asking for it.”
“We think we’re training them, but the horses tell us what they need.”
Davis nods. “It’s weird how they know what you want. They had to, so their master would stay alive in battle. And this guy’s interesting: all business, with a little scaredy-cat thrown in. That’s what makes him quick.”
Sanders walks up, and they compare examples until Davis stops to ask one of the kids working for him why he’s on two feet, not four: “This is a riding center.” Davis loses patience fast with the polished young products of riding schools who land on their bottoms in the dust the first day because they haven’t logged enough time on horseback to stick.
“Over the years,” he resumes, his voice quietening as he watches ibn Jalam, “this horse taught me how to be the best rider I could be, ’cause I had to reach up to his level of sensitivity and lightness. He and another stallion taught me how to have a softer touch, a little feel, if you will.” He grins. “We think we’re training them, but the horses tell us what they need. I used to be in such a big hurry to learn everything at once, but it takes—” He breaks off.
“Decades,” Sanders suggests.
He shakes his head. “Generations.”
Little Rodger’s eyes are closed, his cheeks flushed with the untroubled sleep of a 5-year-old. A handful of pebbles hits his window, startling him awake.
On the grass in front of the downtown St. Louis apartment building stands his grandfather, a cowboy who used to ride in the Calgary Stampede. Tied to the trunk of the nearest tree is a Shetland pony.
“Grandson, get down here,” the old man yells. “I’m gonna teach you to ride.”
Rodger yanks off his pajamas, grabbing for pants. He already knows it’s the best day of his life.
Years later, his grandfather trusts him on his own for the first time. Rodger rooks his friend Fred into helping him with his assignment: Saddle and ride a 3-year-old who hasn’t been handled much at all. The horse glares at them and snorts. The boys manage to rope him and throw him down on the dusty barn floor. Rodger wraps a blindfold over the liquid dark eyes, their pupils dilated with fear. After they tie three of the horse’s legs together to hobble him, all he can do is stand there while they heave a heavy saddle onto his back and cinch it. Rodger mounts him.
The horse bucks a little but turns out to be a pretty easy ride. Afterward, Rodger swings himself out of the saddle with a little swagger. The horse moves away—limping.
Only then does it sink in. “Y’know,” he tells Fred, “we hurt that horse.”
Before, his grandpa had always been there, and he’d been more worried about Grandpa thinking he was “soft” than about anything the horse might be feeling.
Now, though, he can’t forget that limp.
As a young man, Rodger Davis is drawn to the grit and power of endurance racing—and he’s constantly looking for a better horse. He meets an old lady, Jane Llewellyn Ott, who runs a horse farm in Hope, Arkansas. She’s famous for her “blue list,” the Blue Arabian Horse Catalog, a binder in which she keeps track of every horse she can confirm as descended from the original Bedouin stock.
The Bedouins needed sound, intelligent animals that could thrive on very little food in a harsh hot desert, endure its cold nights, carry them long distances at lightning speed, remain calm in battle. So they bred with scrupulous care, using only the finest of their horses, and they kept the line pure, all the horses asil (their desert-bred lineage untainted) for thousands of years.
The rest of the world did not.
A horse needs his head and neck to balance. If you’re dragging his head this way and that, he’s being pulled off balance and has to resist to some degree; if you teach him to respond to a release of pressure instead, he, too, can be more sensitive and responsive.
Three Arabians—the Byerley Turk, the Godolphin Arabian, and the Darley Arabian—are considered the fathers of the Thoroughbred breed. In turn, the Thoroughbred is a part of how the Quarter Horse came into being and the foundation of the Standardbred breed. Today, according to the Institute for the Desert Arabian Horse, fewer than 10 percent of registered Arabians worldwide descend exclusively from the original Bedouin horse.
Ott leads one of them from her stable for Davis to ride.
“These horses are different,” she murmurs. “They react differently to you. They can run forever, but they do it in a controlled way. They’re not crazy, couldn’t be. They’re warhorses.”
Beneath him, he feels strong muscles effortlessly pull together and glide apart. Perfectly balanced, the horse slides easily into a gallop, and they cross rough terrain as though they’re floating a few inches above it. This, thinks Davis, is a creature doing exactly what its body was shaped to do.
When he finally signals that it’s time to head back, the horse turns—then stamps a hoof and turns back, wanting to keep going. For the first time, Davis is riding a horse he can’t wear out, a horse alive to everything around him, interested and intelligent, with strength and heart. He gives in and lets the horse gallop. This is why desert-breds are called “drinkers of the wind.”
He comes back babbling about the amazing horse. “You can have him,” Ott says. She asks for no money. She’s counting on Davis to serve as a two-legged advertisement for the breed.
The king who gave these horses to the Americans was a man of fierce ambition and a keen strategist. At 26, Abdulaziz ibn Saud recaptured his family’s ancestral home of Riyadh; he later took the holy city of Mecca, then united the tribes of the Arabian peninsula, symbolically taking a wife from each tribe. Legend has it that once a woman had been with him, she never stopped loving him.
In 1932, Saudi Arabia became a country, and Abdulaziz became its king. The main source of income was a thin stream of revenue from Muslim pilgrims on hajj to Mecca, and there was little by way of official government except the will of a charismatic king.
Geologists had earlier decided that there was no oil on the peninsula, but Abdulaziz (usually referred to as ibn Saud in the West) was hoping that they were wrong. For a small concession, he granted an American mining engineer the right to explore. He was worried that the peninsula would turn out to be barren, but in 1932, backed by Standard Oil of California, the engineer’s team struck oil in Bahrain. Six years later, Dammam oil well No. 7 spurted even higher.
They’d hit one of the largest sources of petroleum in the world.
By 1943, the company had been renamed the Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO (it is now Saudi Aramco), and the concession had been rewritten.
As Davis heard the story, the Texans who came to drill oil wells were shown the king’s hospitality, and every month their representative, Sam Roach, was asked whether they were happy. At one of these meetings, Roach remarked that the men were OK but their wives and kids were bored and pining for their horses back home. When he showed up for the next month’s check-in, two boxcars filled with horses from the king’s stables had arrived. Those horses came home with their new American families in the 1950s.
Other accounts suggest, less colorfully, that Roach had a friend who was close to the king, was given one of the king’s horses, and started a breeding program. Doesn’t really matter. Somehow, Roach was the conduit that brought the desert-bred Arabian to the States.
It’s 1996. Sarah Sanders is 13, hanging around The Riding Center as many hours as she can. Spirited, stubborn, and lithe, she rides every possible minute. But she’s so eager for results, Davis nicknames her Gorilla Hands. She doesn’t have feel yet.
He understands; he had a hard time learning it himself. His dad, a World War II vet, avoided any hint of emotion or vulnerability. His grandpa only knew how to break a horse, spiritually if not physically. And when Rodger wound up at a school for wayward boys, a tough, pugilistic Irish priest tried to break him.
He soon found a straight path, but it branched every time he got bored: teacher, real estate developer, Coast Guard captain, financial advisor… The only thing that never bored him was horses. After that first epiphany—We hurt that horse—he’d groped for another way, and the sensitive intelligence of the desert-breds helped him find it. Now he has to find a way to teach that feel to Sarah, because inside, she’s panicking: This is the only thing I love—what if I never figure it out?
Davis shows her how to loosen up, how to let her horse loosen up, how to listen: “Why are you pulling that horse around the turn? Lighten your hands.” No longer “tight and grabby,” she learns to communicate by yielding rather than tugging. Now it makes sense: A horse needs his head and neck to balance. If you’re dragging his head this way and that, he’s being pulled off balance and has to resist to some degree; if you teach him to respond to a release of pressure instead, he, too, can be more sensitive and responsive.
She becomes a fine teacher, precisely because she’s not, as people assume by watching her, a natural. The knowledge has come hard, so she knows how to break it down, step by tiny step, analyze the mechanics of a horse’s movement and bring the rider in sync.
Soon she’ll be demonstrating this to members of the Saudi royal family.
Abulfaraj asks Sanders for riding lessons. Then he buys two mares—who will travel to Jeddah pregnant—and a stallion, DB Mirath. One of the mares, DB Nazia, is hard for Davis to part with, but she’s stolen Abulfaraj’s heart; he even writes a poem about her.
When the mares deliver two fillies, Davis and Sanders pore over the pictures. They’re the most perfect baby horses Davis has ever seen. He and Sanders coo over them like grandparents, pointing out limbs, angles, and proportions that predict a perfect conformation. Both are chestnut, the favorite color of the Saudi tribe, the royal family. “They said they were the best horses to ride into battle, because they were the color of blood,” Davis tells Sanders. “Bred to gray or bay, chestnut gets dominated—with the exception of Saudi chestnuts. They hold their own in the genetic battle for color. This is me, not science. This is me after 40 years of watching.”
Next, Abulfaraj invites Davis and Sanders to come to Jeddah and help his family open a multimillion-dollar riding center. They make their first trip in March 2018.
“Jeddah’s huge,” Davis whispers to Sanders, peering out the window as their plane lands. “I thought it was the size of Belleville!”
They’re driven out of the city to the ranch owned by Abulfaraj’s uncle. This will be the site of the Ancient Arabians riding center—as well as mini golf, four-wheelers, dirt bikes, and aquaponics. They talk about organizing trail rides into the desert and setting up a five-day endurance race they’d call The Prophet’s Trail, because the Prophet Mohammed himself is said to have traveled through this valley.
“Jeddah’s huge,” Davis whispers to Sanders, peering out the window as their plane lands. “I thought it was the size of Belleville!”
As she and Davis help set up the center, Sanders gives riding lessons. What she’s really teaching, beneath the technique, is a way of thinking about the relationship with the horse—one that, oddly, bears a stronger resemblance to the ancient Bedouin ways than to those of the American West.
The Bedouins, noted a Swiss traveler in the 1800s, never let a foal drop to the ground; they received it in their arms and handled it gently for several hours, washing and caressing it and stretching its delicate limbs. Horses would stroll into the women’s tents for relief from the heat and to be petted, fed dates, offered a drink of water. Today, some of the methods used in Saudi Arabia (and the rest of the world) can seem brutal by contrast, with their reliance on whips and force to convey a trainer’s intent.
Sanders’ most eager pupils are a little family of Bedouin children, led by a 12-year-old boy who drives his four sisters to the riding center in a beat-up sedan.
Other kids come. Then the head of the village shows up and asks, “Who are the riding teachers?”
Davis gulps. Oh boy.
Quickly, the man says, “I want to thank you. Our village is much quieter since you have taken control of the children.”
Sanders smiles to herself, remembering how cops used to bring Davis boys who’d gotten in trouble. “I’ll introduce them to the hay barn,” Davis would say. “That’ll take the spunk out of them.”
Shown into a black wool Bedouin tent on the Jeddah ranch, Sanders settles herself on a cushion on the ground. Davis isn’t sure his creaky knees will ease him down. Noticing his hesitation, one of their hosts swiftly brings him a chair. Arabic coffee, dates, and nuts are served, and every time Sanders sets down her small cup, it’s immediately refilled. Rude to say no, she reminds herself, afloat with all the liquid. Better just to accept and not drink the fifth cup.
Next comes mint tea in small glasses. A long while later, someone spreads a big plastic covering on the floor to keep the jewel-bright rugs clean, and they carry in a platter so big, Davis wonders whether his hosts have slaughtered a lamb in their honor. Later, he realizes, this dinner is pretty normal: a whole lamb or goat on a bed of about 20 pounds of rice, served family-style with salad and lentils and chickpeas.
On the road the next day, they get stuck behind a stately procession of perhaps 100 camels, the baby dromedaries dragging their hooves at the back of the line. Camels have the right of way here. Like horses, they are sacred: Horses have kept people alive, but it’s the camels’ milk that’s kept the horses alive in the desert.
Though Al-Gosaibi grew up with horses, she was never interested in Arabians: “They kind of had a bad reputation,” she explains. “Hot-blooded, difficult to train, and used for beauty competitions, which is not my favorite thing!”
Another day, Abulfaraj takes his guests to see the 800 or so Saudi desert-breds, all descended from King Abdulaziz’s stock, at Prince Turki’s stable, outside Riyadh. (Yes, they’re told, the country of Turkey was named for this prince’s tribe.)
From the man he calls The Poet, Davis is learning more of his beloved horses’ history. Pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry is woven with a bright thread of praise for the Bedouin horse, which was first partnered with humans 3,500 years ago: “Full of spirit is he—then, when thou has quieted him down, tractable, gentle of temper.” “He continues at full gallop when other horses are dragging their feet in the dust for weariness.” “Swift to attack, to flee, to turn, yet firm as a rock swept down by the torrent.” “He is quick and nimble when he makes his charge, unswerving.” “He surpasses the thunderbolt.”
Davis thinks about the Bedouins leaping onto their horses’ backs—no saddle, no bridle, no spurs—and galloping across the desert. About the Saudis conquering the Silk Highway on these horses. About the Crusades, and how their unusually strong hearts and open lungs allowed these horses to outrace an attacking enemy—and then carry Islam to the rest of the world.
Dining away from the men, Sanders meets many women who are interested in riding. One day, she Googles “lady Saudi trainers,” and up pops a press release about Dana Al-Gosaibi. She’s the Beryl Markham of Saudi Arabia: its first female horse trainer; a strong proponent of the benefits to young women of riding horseback (a longstanding taboo, lest it rupture the hymen, although, as Al-Gosaibi notes, women rode during the time of Mohammed); a yoga teacher (even though yoga was haram, forbidden, until very recently); and a vehement advocate for animal rights in a country that has few veterinarians and countless clowders of feral cats. (Mohammed treated cats so gently, and they are so admired for their ritual cleanliness, that Muslims are divided on the issue of spaying and neutering them; some believe that if a cat was meant to be a mother, it is her right, and spaying might contradict the will of Allah.)
Though Al-Gosaibi grew up with horses, she was never interested in Arabians: “They kind of had a bad reputation,” she explains. “Hot-blooded, difficult to train, and used for beauty competitions, which is not my favorite thing!”
Al-Gosaibi is passionate, well-traveled, independent. She’s also, Sanders decides when they meet, a little lonely. The two women hit it off right away, and they make plans to set up a horse rescue at the new riding center, as well as a ladies’ equestrian team.
Though Al-Gosaibi grew up with horses, she was never interested in Arabians: “They kind of had a bad reputation,” she explains. “Hot-blooded, difficult to train, and used for beauty competitions, which is not my favorite thing!” Sanders, Davis, and Abulfaraj give her a proper introduction to the breed—and change her mind. She also realizes why she was never drawn to the horses she knew as Arabians: “Those halter show horses are popular, but they’re not actually pure Arabians. They’re beautiful in their own way, with that delicate curved nose, but when something is manipulated for a certain purpose, it’s not the same.”
She begins riding and working with the desert-breds. “They are horses from heaven,” she decides. “They’re incredible horses to communicate with, to have a relationship with—it’s one of those things you can’t describe; you have to experience it.” Now, meeting breeders, she sees “the shine in their eyes when they find out that you also know this secret! It’s important to bring this awareness back to the Arabian people, because this is our heritage.”
Davis teaches a shoeing class while he’s in Jeddah, and students come, quite literally, from all over the kingdom. He’s learned to use wild mustangs, never shod, as his guide, “because what’s more perfect than a horse running free?” The angles on all their hooves are 1 or 2 percent different, no more. Once he began to trim to those angles and mimic that rounded toe, his horses’ endurance improved immediately.
The students are stunned. They’ve been learning by trial and error, and Davis winces when he realizes that they’re using horseshoes straight from the box, not shaping them to each individual foot.
The barn manager, Mohammed Al Sharif, listens closely to the shoeing lessons, grateful “for letting desert Arabian horses [be] kept safe with people like Mr. Rodger and Sarah. Here in the kingdom, the government increases the prizes in the competitions just to encourage horse lovers to have Saudi desert bloodline. Pure Saudi desert-bred horses are in danger nowadays. Most of the owners here in the Arab peninsula neglect them. [People are] looking for the mixed blood for halter shows.”
Davis’ jaw tightens. Show Arabians are bred for a “dished” face, concave, a feature the Bedouins never mentioned in their paeans to this horse’s beauty. “It actually cuts their breathing down,” Davis explains. “And their eyes are a little more bulged out, because people think that looks pretty, but in the desert they’d be blinded by the sun and sand. They’ve lost the thicker bone in the legs and the integrity of the hooves, which should be big and solid. The hoof line shrank, so it’s like crumbly fingernails. Also, they’ve lost their minds a little bit. Some of that is the training—some halter trainers use fear to get them to stand up. And they make their soles sensitive so that when they canter, they’ll pick their legs up high and it looks pretty.” He stoops to retrieve a bottle of hoof fungus remedy that’s fallen from his pocket. “In the desert,” he says, straightening, “the most important thing for a horse to have is strong hooves. American breeders have screwed up everything from German shepherds to horses to veil-tailed guppies—and it’s stupid, because if you just observe the natural world, you will see how it’s supposed to be.”
Sharif is a schoolteacher as well as a barn manager, and he invites the Americans to learn a little more about his country by driving four hours to the village where his relatives live. Peering out the windows, Sanders and Davis see nothing but desert, swirled by hot wind (115 degrees Fahrenheit) and studded with the occasional large rocks. Then, in the distance: mountains, a dramatic break in the long tan expanse of sand.
They drive into the village. The front of the Sharif house is a featureless wall. All the hospitality and life and beauty are inside and in interior courtyards. Looking around as she removes her shoes, Sanders is reminded of geodes, ugly muddy rocks that sparkle inside with amethyst and ruby crystals. The big couch is sumptuous, and the usual Arabic coffee, dates, and nuts are brought on trays…
As the conversation meanders, Davis sees how powerfully Sharif identifies with his tribe. He thinks, too, about how the Bedouins were persuaded to leave their nomadic “world without time” and live more prosaically in agricultural villages, granted a government stipend, profit from the oil wells, to encourage their settling down. “They are a tribal people,” Davis remarks later to Sanders, “who happen to be calmed down long enough to let the royal family pump oil.”
“Ninety-nine percent of the Arabian horses in the world are not pure desert-breds,” Davis says. “The Saudi horses are. Their bloodline goes back 2,000 years, and we want to preserve it, not change it with show ring fads.”
He likes many aspects of this country: Crime is practically nonexistent. He’s assured that Sanders can walk down any street in Jeddah at 2 in the morning and no one will touch her. It’s religion that’s responsible, and it’s centered in the Quran, a book he expected to be “a military manual” but is surprised to find rather similar to the Bible. He’s not picking up the religious fanaticism he dreaded. As for the political system, “it’s whoever can swing the sword hardest and fastest, not who’s the biggest liar, like in this country.” He shrugs. “At least you know how the game is played.” The cultural differences would begin to chafe, were he to live here the rest of his life, but as a guest, he is made utterly welcome—and the horses transcend politics.
Over the years, Davis has bred about 100 Saudi desert-bred Arabians. At the moment, he has 25 in his stable, half of which he’s just boarding for other owners. The other half are breeding stock, pure as the Bedouins’ own.
He wants to work with the King Abdulaziz Arabian Horses Center at Dirab, setting up a registry for desert-bred horses (using DNA to verify their purity). Then the riding center could serve as a satellite for the registry, using horses bred at the Dirab facility—which has a stud farm of the king’s old stock, “purest of the pure”—for the ladies’ equestrian team.
“All of their literature is about how to take care of a horse, not the history of how those horses came to be,” Davis murmurs to Sanders as he flips through pamphlets. “They need to tell the world who they are.”
The two of them meet with the Saudi minister of agriculture. He seems interested—especially when they point out that the World Arabian Horse Organization is not focused exclusively on the Saudi desert-bred Arabian.
“Ninety-nine percent of the Arabian horses in the world are not pure desert-breds,” Davis says. “The Saudi horses are. Their bloodline goes back 2,000 years, and we want to preserve it, not change it with show ring fads.”
The minister leans forward, his expression changing from polite to resolute.
“I want to inventory the tribal horses that are still here,” Davis continues eagerly, seeing the shift in mood. “All we need is a hair follicle, pulled out by the root, to test the DNA.”
Now the minister nods, definitely interested.
The people at the Dirab facility seem interested, too—even willing to ship semen back and forth, bolstering the genetic pool of desert-breds. Luckily, Abulfaraj, whose family is from Medina, knows not only the horses’ history but also the tribes who still breed them; his wife is a member of one of the biggest and most influential, the Shammar.
Davis and Sanders also meet with a representative of Princess Reema bint Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, then president of the Saudi Federation for Community Sports and a champion of physical education for girls and athleticism for women. A few months after their last trip, the princess will be named the first female Saudi ambassador to the United States.
All told, Davis and Sanders spent six months of 2018 in Saudi Arabia. Now Davis is cooling his heels, waiting for plans to come together.
“They’ve come from the horse as the only mode of transportation to Maseratis and Ferraris, and they’ve done it in less time than any other culture,” he remarks. The acceleration has left them “a little off balance. They don’t know if they should hustle and get things done or take their time and have another cup of tea.”
“They pray five times a day, 20 or 30 minutes each time,” Sanders says. “Lunches go on for hours.”
He nods. “They are better with their families than we are, and with friendliness and hospitality. They’re also eager to show the world their traditions—and the glory of their horses”—even as they build McDonald’s and put amusement parks inside air-conditioned malls and reopen movie theaters closed since 1983 and guzzle energy drinks and celebrate, for the first time this year, Valentine’s Day.
The cities of Saudi Arabia are looking more and more Western, but the culture’s pace remains deliberate and indirect.
So how are two eager Americans from Southern Illinois going to light a fire?
“There’s plenty of dough, and we’ve been invited back,” says Davis. “If we get some backing, I can put it together in my sleep.” He’s trying to be patient, he adds with a sigh. “I was raised to make things happen now.”
He and Sanders have promised to return to help Abulfaraj’s uncle train more staff and set up a riding curriculum. But they also want to set up that registry, establish the ladies’ equestrian team, and open the horse rescue. Abulfaraj is tired of desert-breds being “looked down upon by most of the breeders around the world” when in fact they “are indeed the most authentic Arabians. They excel in endurance, and they meet all the physical and conformational characteristics mentioned in classical Arabic poetry.”
On their last trip, Davis looked at Al-Gosaibi, Sanders, and Abulfaraj—all still in their thirties, intelligent, dedicated to these horses—and saw the future he’d dreamed of: “These young people could bring this cultural treasure into the modern world like no one else could. The knowledge and love of The Poet, Dana’s cultural ties, Sarah, who grew up with these horses…”
This is the start of something big, Davis is sure of it. The steady restoration of the population of Saudi desert-bred horses. The spread of a gentler way of relating to them. The continuation, in a new form, of a breeding program that began 1,000 years before Mohammed was born.
