Explore "The Sea Horse" by Jorge Luis Borges on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Unlike most other imaginary animals, the Sea Horse is not a composite creature; it is no more than a wild horse whose dwelling place is the sea and who comes ashore only on moonless nights when the breezes bring him the smell of mares. On some undetermined island maybe Borneo the herders hobble the king's finest mares along the coast and hide themselves underground. Here Sindbad saw the stallion that rose from the sea, watched it leap on to the female, and heard its cry.
The definitive edition of the Book of a Thousand and One Nights dates, according to Burton, from the thirteenth century; in this same century lived the cosmographer Zakariyya al-Qaswini who in his treatise Wonders of Creation wrote these words: ‘The sea horse is like the horse of dry land, but its mane and tail grow longer; its colour is more lustrous and its hooves are cleft like those of wild oxen, while its height is no less than the land horse's and slightly larger than the ass's. ' He remarks that a cross between the sea and land species produces a very beautiful breed, and singles out a certain dark pony ‘with white spots like pieces of silver'.