After these came armed those who possessed the curves of Oita, woody mother of longliving elephants, to which nature has granted to live through two hundred rolling years, rounding so often the turning-point of eternal time, or even three hundred. Black they are from the point of the foot to the head, and they feed side by side. Each has projecting teeth on his long jaws, two of them, hooked like a reaper’s sickle, sharp and cutting, and he marches through the ranks of trees on his long legs ; he has a curved neck like a camel, and on his capacious back he carries an innumerable swarm of riders in rows, swinging a firm foot with unbending knees. He has a short curved neck, and a wide forehead shaped like a snake. The eyes on his face are like the little eyes of a pig. He is towering, enormous : as he rolls along, the skinny ears close to the temple on each side, move like fans in the lightest breath of air. A thin little restless waving tail whips the body with a continual regular movement. Often in battle the mountainous beast shakes a tusk and attacks a man like a pilking bull, striking with the borrowed sharptoothed sickle on each side of his mouth and swinging natural spears on both cheeks. Often when he has pierced a man, he lifts him straight up with greedy throat, armour and shield and all; or he throws one down with sharp-pointed tusk, picks up the body as it rolls helpless in a swirl of dust and throws it hurtling through the air at random; he throws about this way and that way the jagged ring of teeth in his crooked jaw, beside the tusks ranged in strings like the backbone of a snake, and stretches down to his feet the sharp sword of the tusks.
These creatures after the Indian war? Lord Dionysos led to the Caucasian district by the Amazonian River, and scattered those helmeted women, as this was after the war. In this conflict, when Deriades sent out his summons to war with Lyaios, the chieftain Pyloites joined him driving a straightlegged elephant into the fray. He was the warlike blood of the race which produced Marathon, one blessed in his children ; and he was followed to the conflict by a neighbouring people of different speech, from Eristobareia with her lovely coronals.
Tribes of Derbices were there with Deriades, Ethiopians and Sacai and various nations of Bactrians, and a great host of woolly-headed Blemyes. The Ethiopians follow a peculiar and clever fashion in battle. They wear the top of a dead horse’s head, hiding in this disguise the true shape of their faces. Thus they fasten another face on the human head, and join the dead to the living. So in the battle they startle the unwitting foe with this bastard head ; and their chieftain lets out a deceitful sound from his mouth, and gives vent to a horse’s neigh with his manly voice.
These were the hosts which gathered at their king’s call. The whole army was led to battle by the emperor of the Indians, son of Hydaspes the watery lover in union with Astris daughter of Helios, happy in her offspring—men say that her mother was Ceto, a Naiad daughter of Oceanos—and Hydaspes crept into her bower till he flooded it, and wooed her to his embrace with conjugal waves. He had the genuine Titan blood ; for from the bed of primeval Thaumas his rosyarm consort Electra brought forth two children—from that bed came a river and a messenger of the heavenly ones, Iris quick as the wind and swiftly flowing Hydaspes, Iris travelling on foot and Hydaspes by water. Both had an equal speed on two contrasted paths: Iris among the immortals and Hydaspes among the rivers.
So great then, was the host there assembled. The city was crammed with people; helmeted crowds were surrounded by favourite young squires till they filled the circle of the streets that ran all four ways in the city, some thick at the threeways, some in the moat, some on the height of the: walls, while others lay quietly on the turrets and slept under arms. The company of leaders was entertained by Deriades in his own hall, and all touched the same table as their hospitable king in turns on rows of seats. Feasting engaged them in the evening, the wing of sleep in the night: the army slumbered under arms on the eve of battle, and slumbering they had to do with battlestirring dreams, as they fought against shadows like Satyrs.
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