Wall Street Journal:

We were preparing to mount the horses when Qaboos announced: “Horse little crazy.” He said this nonchalantly, as if he were saying this horse is white. Crazy. What was Qaboos’s definition of crazy? Crazy as in dangerous crazy? Or crazy as in crazy fun? Or was it a word that rhymed with crazy. Lazy? Maybe Scarzo detected my confusion. He turned his scimitar head and regarded me with one ebony eye. Or perhaps he was considering the scents I exuded—deodorant and breath mints, ibuprofen and middle-age angst.

Or maybe the horse discerned something more profound— the real reason that I was sitting atop him now—that I hoped to resolve a patchwork of personal mysteries that revolved around horses, Arabia, and magic, the origins of which lie buried in the deep folds of my childhood memories. Whatever the case, several hours later—as I dangled off Scarzo’s rump, one foot tangled in a stirrup, vainly trying to regain my balance as he rampaged across the beach toward a family that had just spread out a picnic blanket—I understood exactly what Qaboos had meant by crazy. But let’s freeze here in the midst of this peril and return to the origin of this calamity to see how the djinns had been plotting this moment from long ago.

I’m a City Kid who has never had any interaction with horses (I’ve touched exactly three in my life and ridden one once for 60 minutes) but they have always fascinated me. This is a great story about the history of these majestic creatures.