Jordan

    In the summer of 1967, the uneasy, never ratified truce between Jordan and Israel ended with the second Arab-Israeli War, and the Israelis occupied the entire west bank of the Jordan, including Jericho.
    East of the river and not far from that ancient town, lies Shuna, where, since about 1961 King Hussein's Royal Horsemaster has been breeding up the fast disappearing, centuries-old lines of desert Arabian horses.  On the night in 1967 when it became apparent that Israeli forces were close at hand, Rahdi, the Bedouin stud groom, was in charge at Shuna.  Quickly he decided what to do.  Mustering the other grooms, all Bedouins who would rather die than abandon their horses, Rahdi ordered each man to saddle up a stallion or mare for himself and, where feasible, to lead another.  The remainder of the sixty or so horses and young stock were herded between them, and they set out to ride the forty-odd miles to Amman.  They went across country, riding up through the mountains by way of precipitous slopes and boulder strewn wadis.  The beautiful, deer-like little horses climbed like cats, with as much confidence, as though the hot sun was warming their backs and they were carrying Princess Muna and her friends on one of those gay outings that were common before the war.  Soon after dawn, they came to the big city of Amman straggling up and around the seven hills on which it was built, and Rahdi led his party to Hummar, on the outskirts, where the King and Princess Muna live in a modern, but unpretentious villa.  Here the horses were housed in recently completed stables.  Visitors to Jordan may come to see them, living in dazzling white buildings of graceful Moorish or Spanish design, a fitting setting for horses of such beauty.
    From the earliest times, Arabian horses, famed for these qualities, were exported to many countries.  Of later years, the Bedouin's increasing poverty and the few pounds obtainable for a foal, however bred, have sometimes tempted the tribes not to be too choosy with selective breeding.  By 1961, horses of the pure, old blood lines were getting dangerously scarce in Jordan, and King Hussein asked Santiago Lopez to become Royal Horsemaster and try to remedy the situation.
    It proved a fascinating, worthwhile work of love.  Sometimes a horse arrives at the stud as a gift for the King, and patient research eventually substantiates the owner's claims for its ancestry; sometimes word arrives of a beautiful stallion of a famous blood line, in the black, goats' hair tents of a sheikh miles away in the desert; or there is the exciting discovery of a mare of the purest breeding among the local police horses or drawing a Bedouin plough.  Gradually a nucleus of "asil" horses was collected, a few of the older mares, now mostly dead or retired, having once belonged to King Abdullah, the present (1971) king's grandfather.  Skillful breeding has produced stock of indisputable ancestry and beauty, many of the younger animals fathered by Al Baheer, a magnificently bred old stallion that was only discovered a few years ago.  Some of the young stock is sold abroad to help enrich the sorely strained Jordanian economy, but numbers of animals, including the lovely Kerima, are retained to build up the stud.  Vast sums have been offered for this mare, considered the epitome of Arabian equine beauty, but she is beyond price.  Many of the horses are now registered with the British Arab Horse Society, and no animal ever leaves the Royal Stud without the written guarantee that its pedigree is exactly as stated.
    The horses used by the Jordanian Royal Guard, chiefly for ceremonial duties, and those of the patrols of mounted police that keep law and order in some villages and parts of the desert, are mostly country-bred Arabian horses, if not of the purest breeding.  So too are the majority of the Bedouin horses today, wiry, willing little animals, that are fast, well up-to-weight, and of exceptional endurance and hardiness.

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