For much of the 2000s, the chestnut Saqlawi Sh’aifi stallion Mash-hur Shammar was herd sire in the desert stud of the paramount Shaykh of the Northern Shammar, Dham Ahmad al-Dham al-Jarba. I never saw him in real life but the three photos below provide a good idea of what a desert-bred stallion looks like well into the XXIst century. I am especially taken by the resemblance with wild desert creatures, bird, gazelle or fox. The eye sockets, the jowls, the lower lip and the long nostrils stand out. The story of his line is fascinating. Sometime in the 1980s, a tribal dispute broke out between the ‘abid, descendants of the slaves of the Jarba shaykhs of the Shammar, and a Shammari man of the Bsaylan clan, during which a mare of the Bsaylan was shot and killed. The Jarba shaykhs stepped in to resolve the dispute, as they are legally responsible for the actions of their ‘abid in Bedouin tribal law. One of the shaykhs offered to give a mare to the Bsaylan clan as compensation for the one they had lost. He sent one of his men to Khleif ibn Bisra, to buy a three year old mare from…