But it is half-past one, the sacred German dinner-hour. 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. One morning, for
instance, I came to the stable and was preparing to give him his
lesson in arithmetic. He was no sooner in front of the
spring-board than he began to stamp with his foot. I left him
alone and was astounded to hear a whole sentence, an absolutely
human sentence, come letter by letter from his hoof: 'Albert has
beaten Hanschen,' was what he said to me that day. Another time,
I wrote down from his dictation, 'Hanschen has bitten Kama.' Like
a child seeing its father after an absence, he felt the need to
inform me of the little doings of the stable; he provided me with
the artless chronicle of a humble and uneventful life."
Krall, for that matter, living in the midst of his miracle, seems
to think this quite natural and almost inevitable. I, who have
been immersed in it for only a few hours, accept it almost as
calmly as he does. I believe without hesitation what he tells me;
and, in the presence of this phenomenon which, for the first time
in man's existence, gives us a sentence that has not sprung from
a human brain, I ask myself whither we are tending, where we
stand and what lies ahead of us.
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