A horse that will not stir until its secret is known, and then will cross the world: the shape here is the mount that carries its rider beyond every ordinary reach — made by a craftsman's cunning in one telling, grown from a witch's stable in another.

The Arabian witness is the Thousand and One Nights (a corpus compiled c. 800–1500 CE) as Englished by Edward William Lane (1801–1876), where three sages come before a Persian king bearing a golden peacock, a brass trumpet, and "a horse of ivory and ebony". Mount it, its maker promises, and "it will convey him to whatever country he desiretli" — the old print's spelling kept. The king's son leaps astride before the demonstration is finished: shown only the "turning-pin, by which to make it ascend", he is carried up out of the court's sight and must discover for himself, on the horse's shoulders, the two buttons like "the head of a cock" that govern its descent. The wooden marvel is exactly as magical as its rider's knowledge of it.

The Russian witness is homelier. In the tale of Marya Morevna, a skazka (Russian folk-tale) given by W. R. S. Ralston (1828–1889), the British Museum's scholar of Russian, in his Russian Folk-Tales (published 1873), Prince Ivan must outride Koshchei the Deathless, whose own horse talks and scents trouble ahead. A helpful bee directs the prince to the stable of the Baba Yaga, who flies in an iron mortar driving it with the pestle, and the prize there is a "sorry colt rolling in the muck". Stolen and pastured in green meadows, the colt "turned into a wondrous steed", of which Ivan boasts that "it flies just like a bird". Koshchei's mount concedes the race before it is run — "Prince Ivan has a horse now which is better than I" — and in the end it is the steed's hoof, cracking his skull, that fells the Deathless one before the prince finishes the work.

An ivory toy that must be studied; a muck-rolled colt that must be recognized. Why does the tale hide its best horse where only the curious or the desperate will look?