Beneath the heaped turf of this down, lay thousands of glorious corpses of anonymous heroes, who here had died glorious deaths.

Whence, in the florid language of Diranda, they called this field “The Field of Glory.”

CHAPTER XXXVI They Attend The Games

At last the third day dawned; and facing us upon entering the plain, was a throne of red log-wood, canopied by the foliage of a red-dyed Pandannus.  Upon this throne, purple-robed, reclined those very magnificent and illustrious lords seigniors, the lord seigniors Hello and Piko.  Before them, were many gourds of wine; and crosswise, staked in the sod, their own royal spears.

In the middle of the down, as if by a furrow, a long, oval space was margined of about which, a crowd of spectators were seated.  Opposite the throne, was reserved a clear passage to the arena, defined by air-lines, indefinitely produced from the leveled points of two spears, so poised by a brace of warriors.

Drawing near, our party was courteously received, and assigned a commodious lounge.

The first encounter was a club-fight between two warriors.  Nor casque of steel, nor skull of Congo could have resisted their blows, had they fallen upon the mark; for they seemed bent upon driving each other, as stakes, into the earth.  Presently, one of them faltered; but his adversary rushing in to cleave him down, slipped against a guavarind; when the falterer, with one lucky blow, high into the air sent the stumbler’s club, which descended upon the crown of a spectator, who was borne from the plain.

“All one,” muttered Pike.

“As good dead as another,” muttered Hello.

The second encounter was a hugging-match; wherein two warriors, masked in Grisly-bear skins, hugged each other to death.

The third encounter was a bumping-match between a fat warrior and a dwarf.  Standing erect, his paunch like a bass-drum before a drummer, the fat man was run at, head-a-tilt by the dwarf, and sent spinning round on his axis.

The fourth encounter was a tussle between two-score warriors, who all in a mass, writhed like the limbs in Sebastioni’s painting of Hades.  After obscuring themselves in a cloud of dust, these combatants, uninjured, but hugely blowing, drew off; and separately going among the spectators, rehearsed their experience of the fray.

“Braggarts!” mumbled Piko.

“Poltroons!” growled Hello.

While the crowd were applauding, a sober-sided observer, trying to rub the dust out of his eyes, inquired of an enthusiastic neighbor, “Pray, what was all that about?”

“Fool! saw you not the dust?”

“That I did,” said Sober-Sides, again rubbing his eyes, “But I can raise a dust myself.”

The fifth encounter was a fight of single sticks between one hundred warriors, fifty on a side.

In a line, the first fifty emerged from the sumachs, their weapons interlocked in a sort of wicker-work.  In advance marched a priest, bearing an idol with a cracked cocoanut for a head,—­Krako, the god of Trepans.  Preceded by damsels flinging flowers, now came on the second fifty, gayly appareled, weapons poised, and their feet nimbly moving in a martial measure.