The Enchanted Horse and the Princess of Bengal: Love Across the Skies

Of all the canonical tales gathered into the Alf Layla wa-Layla, none survives in two such different forms as the story of the ebony horse — and the Bengal version is the one the wider world has read. In the Arabic Macnaghten and Bulaq recensions, the princess who is carried into the sky is a daughter of the King of Sanaa in Yemen, and the prince is named Qamar al-Aqmar. But in the version that Antoine Galland set down in his diary on 13 May 1709, dictated by the Maronite traveller Hanna Diyab in a Paris drawing room, the princess is from a far more distant kingdom: she is the Princess of Bengal, and her rescuer is Prince Firuz Shah of Persia. It is this Galland line, refined and re-named by Andrew Lang at the close of the nineteenth century, that gave the English-speaking world its enduring image of two lovers carried across the night sky on a horse of polished ebony, from a Persian palace to a Bengali rooftop and home again. This is the love story of the Arabian Nights that crosses the widest geography — and it is the story whose flight, more than any other in world folklore, anticipates the modern dream of the flying machine.

In choosing the Galland–Lang version for the modern retelling, this site honours the line of transmission by which the tale actually entered the imagination of the West — and the kingdoms of Persia and Bengal which, by historical accident, became the two poles between which European readers first imagined long-distance flight.

The Indian Sage at the Nawruz of Shiraz

It was the festival of Nawruz, the first day of spring, when the courts of Persia opened their gates to the wonders of the world. King Sabur of Persia — most generous of kings, most learned of patrons — sat upon his golden throne in the audience hall of Shiraz, and the great courtyard outside was filled with travellers come from every land to offer their finest curiosities. From China came painters with rolls of silk; from Byzantium, clock-makers with whirring brass automata; from al-Andalus, lute-makers with new modes of music; from India, three sages bearing three wonders.

The first sage brought a peacock of gold whose tail unfolded in a fan that struck the hour. The second brought a trumpet of brass that, set above the city gate, would sound of its own accord whenever an enemy approached within a day’s ride. The king praised both wonders, and rewarded each sage with a robe of honour. Then the third sage stepped forward.

He was old, very old, with skin the colour of polished walnut and eyes the colour of a banked fire. He bowed once, low, and clapped his hands. Two attendants led into the hall a horse — but a horse such as no man at that court had ever seen. Its body was carved from a single block of ebony, black as a moonless night, polished until it caught the torchlight like a mirror. Its mane and tail were of fine-spun silver, its bridle and stirrups of red gold, its eyes two carnelians that seemed to hold a slow inner fire. From the saddle-bow, two small ivory pegs protruded — one on the right, one on the left.

“O King of the Age,” the sage said, “this horse will carry its rider through the air to any place in the world he wishes, and bring him home again, in less time than your fastest courier covers a single stage.” A murmur ran through the court. The king’s son, Prince Firuz Shah — a young man of perhaps twenty, with a clear brow and quick eyes — leaned forward in his place beside the throne. The king named no doubt; the king named only a price. “Name what you will, sage, and it is yours.”

The sage bowed again. “I ask only one thing. The hand of the Princess your daughter in marriage.” A silence fell upon the hall like a curtain. The king’s daughter, the Princess Shirin, was thirteen years old and as bright as a morning star, and the sage who knelt before her was at least sixty and as withered as a winter root. The king, who would never refuse a bargain twice spoken in open court, looked uncertainly at the prince. Prince Firuz Shah rose from his place. “Father, before we conclude, let me try the horse. A wonder is only a wonder if it works.” It was a courteous evasion. The king assented gratefully.

The Solo Flight to the Rooftop of Bengal

The prince mounted the ebony horse where it stood, in the very centre of the audience hall. The sage, smiling a small, careful smile, leaned up and whispered, “To rise, turn the peg upon the right. The remainder you will discover for yourself.” The prince turned the peg.

The horse trembled once beneath him, gathered itself like a living animal, and rose. It rose first to the height of the lamps, then to the carved ceiling, and then — through the great square opening above the throne by which the smoke of incense escaped — out into the bright spring sky of Shiraz. Below, the courtiers cried out in fear and delight. Within minutes the horse was higher than the highest minaret in the city; within an hour, it was higher than the mountains of the Zagros. And though Prince Firuz Shah turned and turned the right-hand peg, the horse did not descend. He had been given no key for the way down.

For half a day he flew. He passed eastward over deserts the colour of old copper, over rivers that wound like silver threads, over cities the size of pebbles. The sun set behind him; the moon rose ahead. At last, in the cool of the evening, his hand chanced upon the second peg, the one upon the left side of the saddle-bow. He turned it experimentally. The horse began, slowly and with perfect grace, to descend.

It descended toward a vast palace set upon the flat alluvial green of a great river delta, a palace of pale rose-coloured stone with terracotta tiles upon its roofs and gilded finials at its turrets — unmistakably the architecture of Bengal. By the time the horse alighted, it had set itself down with the silence of a falling leaf upon the marble floor of a flat rooftop terrace lit by hanging lamps. Below, somewhere in the palace, a softer light burned. The prince dismounted, crept to the inner door, and descended a narrow stair. He found himself in a chamber where lamps of perfumed oil burned low, and where, upon a couch strewn with jasmine, a young woman lay sleeping.

She wore the dress of a Bengali princess — a sari of indigo silk bordered in gold, the aanchal drawn lightly over her hair, gold bangles upon her wrists, a thin gold pendant resting at her throat, vermilion in the part of her hair to mark her unmarried royal status. Her attendants slept beside the couch. He looked at her, looked again, and knelt at a respectful distance. The princess woke at the soft sound of his step. She did not cry out. She looked at him calmly, took in the foreign dress and the foreign face, and said in a low voice, “Stranger, you have entered the chamber of a daughter of the King of Bengal. Either you are a guest of my father whose business is so secret that no one has told me of it, or you are something far stranger than any guest. Which is it?”

And so, slowly, by the light of the perfumed lamps, with her attendants still sleeping, the Prince of Persia told the Princess of Bengal how he had come to her rooftop on a horse of ebony. He did not lie; he did not boast. He showed her the horse upon the terrace. He told her his name, his lineage, and that his being in her chamber compromised her honour and that he begged her permission to depart at first light. The princess, whose name in the Galland version is never given but whom Lang’s English readers came to call simply the Princess of Bengal, considered him for a long time. Then she said: “It would be a poor courtesy in the daughter of a king to send away a prince of Persia without supper. Stay until morning. We shall see what is to be done.” And so they spoke until the dawn, by lamplight, with her attendants still sleeping. And by morning, what had passed between them was not love declared, but something quieter and harder to undo: trust given.

The Sage’s Revenge and the Long Way to Kashmir

Prince Firuz Shah returned to Shiraz the following dawn on the back of the ebony horse, carrying the princess with him, for she had asked, simply, “Take me with you, that I may know your father.” His father the king, weeping with joy at his return and undone with relief at the proof that the wonder was real, ordered the Indian sage released from the prison into which the king had thrown him during the prince’s long absence — and ordered the marriage of the prince and the princess to be celebrated within the week.

The sage was released. The sage smiled the same small, careful smile. The sage, in the hour between his release and the public proclamation of the marriage, walked unhurriedly to the courtyard where the ebony horse stood under guard, dismissed the guards on the king’s authority, mounted the horse, descended into the inner pleasure-garden where the Princess of Bengal walked alone among the iris and the early roses — and seized her, and turned the peg, and rose into the air with her before her single cry had reached the prince.

The sage carried her westward, then northward, into the high cold valleys of Kashmir. There, in a meadow beneath the snow-capped Pir Panjal, he set the horse down beside a clear lake, and turned to the princess with the leer of a man who has waited sixty years for a single thing. The princess did not weep. She stood very straight, looked once at the high mountains, and screamed.

Her scream carried across the meadow, and out of the trees, by perfect chance, rode the King of Kashmir at the head of his hunting party. He saw the foreign sage; he saw the foreign princess; he saw the strange black horse. He drew his sword. The Indian sage was old, and slow, and was struck down before he could turn either peg. The King of Kashmir lifted the princess with great courtesy onto his own horse, took her to his summer palace upon the lake, and there — having discovered her royal lineage and her beauty — informed her that she would honour him by becoming his wife the following morning.

The princess, who had ridden across half a continent in a single day and watched one would-be husband killed before she could plan her next move, understood that she had escaped a dragon only to fall to a tiger. So she did the only thing she could think of. When the King of Kashmir entered the chamber where she had been lodged, she began to laugh and to weep at once. She tore at her hair; she tore at her garments; she called the king a wind that walked, a fish that talked. She spoke in languages he did not know, then in no language at all. The king, who had wanted a queen, drew back. “She is mad,” he said. He summoned every physician of Kashmir, and every physician of the lands beyond.

The Disguise of the Physician and the Flight Home

In Shiraz, Prince Firuz Shah had wasted no time in mourning. The moment the sage rose from the garden with the princess, the prince exchanged his court dress for the long brown robe and turban of a wandering dervish, and set out on foot toward the east, asking at every caravan halt, at every market, at every gate, whether anyone had seen a black horse fly past, or a strange foreign woman appear from nowhere. For more than a year he searched. At last, in a caravanserai on the road from Lahore to Srinagar, he heard a Kashmiri merchant tell the story of his king’s mad bride and the foreign physicians who came and went and could not cure her. The prince listened until the story was done, and then asked the merchant only this: “Was there an ebony horse with her when she was found?”

“They say the king keeps it in the inner treasury at his summer palace,” the merchant said. “It is a thing of black wood, and they say its eyes are red stones.” The prince finished his cup of tea, paid the innkeeper, and at first light he was on the road to Srinagar.

He entered the city of Srinagar in the dress of a physician of Persia, with a satchel of herbs and a turban of green silk that marked him as a learned man. He went to the palace; he was admitted to the king; he asked, with all the proper humility of his trade, to be allowed to attempt the cure of the princess. The king, who had long since exhausted his patience and his treasury upon physicians, agreed at once.

The princess, alone in her chamber, recognised him from across the room. She did not betray the recognition by so much as a movement of her eye. He bowed; he spoke in Persian, very softly, beneath the cover of the formal greeting; she answered, very softly, in the same tongue, beneath the cover of an unintelligible cry. By the second visit, they had a plan.

The physician asked the king for one favour and one only: that the ebony horse, by which the princess’s affliction had begun, be brought out into the open court of the palace; that the princess be brought out also; that he, the physician, would perform upon her, in sight of the whole court, a rite of exorcism that would draw the evil out and bind it to the horse. The king agreed. The horse was brought out. The princess was brought out. The court assembled, the king and his ministers and his soldiers standing in a respectful ring upon the broad marble pavement beneath the Kashmiri sky.

The physician walked slowly around the horse. He scattered seven different incenses into seven small braziers about its hooves; the smoke rose in fragrant pillars. He spoke a great many words in a Persian so old that no one in the Kashmiri court could understand a single syllable. He laid his hand reverently upon the saddle. He helped the princess, weeping prettily now with what every Kashmiri took to be the released spirit, up into the saddle behind him. He turned the peg upon the right. The horse trembled once, and rose.

By the time the King of Kashmir understood what he was seeing, the horse was higher than the lamps of the courtyard; by the time he gave the order to shoot, the horse was higher than the high white peaks of the Pir Panjal; by the time the order was relayed, the horse was a small dark point against the bright blue of the spring sky, carrying two riders westward toward Shiraz.

They came down in the same courtyard from which the princess had been carried off, in time for the second proclamation of their marriage. The king Sabur ordered the ebony horse hung in chains in the deepest chamber of the royal treasury, that no man might ever again use it for an evil purpose. And the marriage of Prince Firuz Shah of Persia and the Princess of Bengal was celebrated for forty days and forty nights — once in Shiraz, and a second time, by the courteous insistence of the prince, in the rose-stone palace upon the Ganges where she had first been found.

The Moral: Trust Crossing the Sky

The moral of the Galland version of the tale is not the simple Aesopic one of the cleverness of patience nor the romantic one of love conquering all distance. It is something subtler and harder. The tale turns upon two distinct kinds of crossing — the crossing of physical distance by the ebony horse, and the crossing of cultural distance between Persia and Bengal — and it argues that both crossings are made possible by exactly the same thing: the quiet, considered offer of trust.

The Princess of Bengal, awakened in the middle of the night by a foreign man in her chamber, does not scream. She listens. She considers his words. She offers him supper. That single act — the offer of supper to a stranger whose intentions she has measured and found honest — is what makes everything that follows possible. The flight on the ebony horse is only the physical metaphor for the crossing of trust that has already happened on the rooftop. The horse can carry two riders only because the two riders have agreed, in advance, to share its saddle.

“عشق ز دریایی پر تلاطم می‌گذرد”
‘eshq ze daryâ-yi por talâtum mi-guzarad
— “Love crosses a turbulent sea.” A line from the Persian Sufi tradition, often attributed to Hafez, used in the romantic literature of the Indo-Persian cultural sphere to mark the moment a lover undertakes a journey across water, sky, or unfamiliar country.

The Princess of Bengal’s feigned madness in the palace of Kashmir is the same trust, weaponised. She knows, without speaking to him, that her prince will come. She buys him a year — not by cleverness alone, but by the absolute certainty that the trust she gave him on a rooftop in Bengal has not lapsed.

Why the Tale Has Lasted

The ebony horse of the Galland–Lang version is the oldest detailed depiction of a flying machine in world literature. It has, by name, all the parts a modern reader would recognise — a frame, a pair of independent controls (the right peg for ascent, the left peg for descent), a controllable altitude, and a controllable speed. Thomas Keightley in 1834, Sir Richard Burton in 1885, and the historians of early aviation in the early twentieth century all pointed to this single tale as the literary ancestor of the helicopter — a machine that ascends and descends by the deliberate operation of a vertical mechanism, rather than by the gradual lift of a horizontal wing. Leonardo’s notebooks contain a drawing of a man-carrying mechanical bird; the ebony horse predates Leonardo by at least four centuries. The thirteenth-century Old French Cleomades of Adenes le Roi simply translated the tale into the conventions of medieval romance; Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” set the flying horse of brass before the court of King Cambyuskan two centuries before Leonardo took up his pen. The dream of long-distance personal flight is at least as old as this story, and this story is older than the oldest manuscript we have of it.

The Bengal substitution in the Galland line gave the tale its second and longer life. For European readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the readers of Galland and of Lang and of the thousand chapbook adaptations between them — Persia was a place of poets and Bengal was a place of fabulous wealth, and the love-flight from the one to the other was a perfect emblem of the Indo-Persian cultural sphere that, by historical accident, had been the actual literary and political world of the Mughal court. The princess in the indigo sari upon the rooftop in the Galland version is not a piece of Orientalist embroidery; she is the literary memory of the long, real conversation between Persia and Bengal that had produced the Mughal miniature, the ghazal in Persian written in the Bengal sultanate, the trade of indigo and silk and pepper across the Bay of Bengal. The ebony horse carries Firuz Shah and his princess from one end of that conversation to the other, in a single night.

And it carries, in its saddlebags, the same warning it has always carried. The Indian sage who built the horse was a great craftsman; he was not, for that, a good man. The horse will fly for whoever turns the right peg. It is the rider, and the trust given, that decides whether the flight ends in a marriage or in a meadow beside a cold Kashmiri lake. The tale, in all its versions and in all its languages, has lasted because it remembers this: that the most powerful machines in the world are powered, in the end, by the moral character of those who sit in their saddles.

Reading time: about 10 minutes. This retelling follows the Galland–Lang transmission line of the tale, with names, places, and plot points from Galland’s Histoire du Cheval Enchanté (1717) and Andrew Lang’s “The Enchanted Horse” in The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1898), supplemented by the Macnaghten Arabic recension (Nights 357–371) and the comparative-folklore notes of Thomas Keightley and Sir Richard Burton.

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