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The entrails of the beast sacrificed by Damia had been black as though scorched, and a terrific groan had been heard from the god himself in the great shrine; the pillars of the great hypostyle had trembled and the three heads of Cerberus, lying at the feet of Serapis; had opened their jaws. Gorgo listened in silence to the old woman's story; and all she said in reply was: "Let them wail."
Adorned with angadas decked with gems, and with uplifted arms, they were endued with great courage. Capable of forcibly slaying all foes, they were irresistible in prowess. Drinkers of blood and fat and other animal matter, they subsisted on the flesh and entrails of animals. Some had their locks tied in tall tufts above their heads.
In one field, which had been used as a place of slaughter for the cattle, whole troops of vultures, of various kinds, were stalling about amongst the offal, or sitting, with open beaks and wings outspread, upon the dry branches of the neighbouring pecan-trees, warming themselves in the sunbeams, no bad type of the Mexicans; whilst here and there, a solitary wolf or prairie dog prowled amongst the heads, hides, and entrails of the slaughtered beasts, taking his breakfast as deliberately as his human neighbours.
At that moment it burst, and limbs, and head, and entrails, were seen flying in the air, with the fragments of the shell, and prostrate and struggling forms lay writhing on every hand in the last, fierce agonies of death. A yell of despair and a shout of triumph burst at the same moment from the adverse parties.
In nine cases out of ten, Sunday "kitchen" was a cow's head, a "calf's head and pluck," a pair of cow's feet, a few sheep's "trotters" or a quart of sheep's blood. Sometimes it was the entrails of a pig. Only when there was no money for "kitchen" did we have blood. It was at first fried and then made part of the broth. The broth-pot on Sunday was the center.
France, doomed to feel the beak and talons of these harpies in its entrails, impoverished by a government that robbed her at home while it humiliated her abroad, struggled vainly in its misery, and was now on the verge of another series of internecine combats civil war seeming the only alternative to a voluptuous and licentious peace.
At the prison de la Force the victims are stripped stark naked and literally "carved" for half an hour, after which, when every one has had a good view, they are finished off by a blow that lays bare their entrails. The slaughterers, too, have their scruples and exhibit that moral sense whose existence in crowds we have already pointed out.
And it was to the neighbouring mountains that the products of so many careful wrappings were borne for burial, while the Nile carried away the blood from the bodies and the filth of their entrails. That chain of living rocks that rises before us, coloured each morning with the same rose, as of a tender flower, is literally stuffed with dead bodies.
Then the Erie disemboweled the strangled dogs, cast their entrails into the fire, and kicked aside the carcasses, shouting: "Atensi stands naked upon the Moon! What shall she wear to cover her?" "The soft hide of a Hidden Child!" answered a Sachem from behind the altar. "We have so dreamed it."
Cuirasses, forks, clarions, pieces of wood, iron and brass, corn, straw, and garments were scattered about among the corpses; here and there a phalarica on the point of extinction burned against a heap of baggage; in some places the earth was hidden with shields; horses' carcasses succeeded one another like a series of hillocks; legs, sandals, arms, and coats of mail were to be seen, with heads held in their helmets by the chin-pieces and rolling about like balls; heads of hair were hanging on the thorns; elephants were lying with their towers in pools of blood, with entrails exposed, and gasping.
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