Appearance
The Mule's appearance varies greatly from region to region. Its color is most commonly given as purple, sometimes as black with a white cross on its chest. It has silver (or iron) horseshoes that produce a hideous trotting, louder than any horse is capable of producing.
Despite being headless, the Mule still neighs (usually very loud), and sometimes it moans like a crying woman. It also has a bridle tied to its non-existing mouth, and spews fire through its non-existing nostrils (or, in some versions, from its severed neck).
Read more about this topic: Headless Mule
Famous quotes containing the word appearance:
“The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world.... The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it.”
—R.G. (Robin George)
“What! Would you make no distinction between hypocrisy and devotion? Would you give them the same names, and respect the mask as you do the face? Would you equate artifice and sincerity? Confound appearance with truth? Regard the phantom as the very person? Value counterfeit as cash?”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)
“Hence, the less government we have, the better,—the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)