...of a captivated audience

Straightaway, to the strains of a Persian melody that seemed largely unfamiliar to the Shah - it was actually a little effort of Nechwal's own - the grey began to perform a sequence of positively witty steps. Thighs, hooves, hindquarters and head: it was thoroughly graceful. Not a word, not a sound! No instructions whatsoever! Was it the rider controlling the horse, or the horse the rider? There was silence all around. Everyone held their breath. Even though they were sitting so close they could practically reach out and touch horse and rider, they followed the spectacle through opera glasses and lorgnettes. It couldn't be brought near enough. The grey pricked up its ears: it was as though it took pleasure in the silence. Intimately and proudly and curiously its large, dark, moist, intelligent eyes surveyed the ladies and gentleman seated all around it - not at all in the expectation of applause, like a circus grey. Just once it looked up at the box of His Majesty the Shah of Persia, as though to ascertain for whom it was doing all of this. With aristocratic hauteur it raised its right foreleg, only a little, as though greeting an equal. Then it described a circle, as the music seemed to require. Thereupon, it gently set its hooves down on the red carpet; but suddenly, at the sound of the cymbals, it produced an astonishing - but elegant and, even in its show of exuberance, perfectly measured - leap, stopped dead, waited a second for the sweet sound of the flute and then, when it finally came, followed it by a gentle and velvety trot, with a hint of a zigzag to suggest the mazy inscrutability of the Orient. The music stopped briefly. In that time, one could hear only the soft delicate impacts of the hooves on the carpet. In the great harem of the Shah of Persia - so far as he could remember - not one of the women had displayed as much loveliness, dignity, grace and beauty as that grey Lippizaner from the stud of His Royal and Imperial Apostolic Majesty.

[The String of Pearls, Roth, J.]