A True Story (1.11-1.15)

We determined to go still further inland, but we met what they call the Vulture Dragoons, and were arrested. These are men riding on large

“And if I succeed,” said he, “in the war which I am now making on the people of the sun, you shall lead the happiest of lives with me.” We asked whothe enemy were, and what the quarrel was about. “Phaethon,’ said he, “the king of the inhabitants of the sun—for it is inhabited, [*]

That night we stopped there as his guests, but at daybreak we arose and took our posts, for the scouts signalled that the enemy was near. The number of our army was a hundred thousand, apart from the porters, the engineers, the infantry and the foreign allies; of this total, eighty thousand were Vulture Dragoons and twenty thousand Grassplumeriders, The Grassplume is also a very large bird, which instead-of plumage is all shaggy with grass and has wings very like lettuce-leaves. Next to these the Millet-shooters and the Garlic-fighters were posted. Endymion also had allies who came from the Great Bear—thirty thousand Flea-archers and fifty thousand Volplaneurs. The Flea-archers ride on great fleas,

These were the forces of Endymion. They all had the same equipment—helmets of beans (their beans are large and tough); scale-corselets of lupines (they sew together the skins of lupines to make the corselets, and in that country the skin of the lupine is unbreakable, like horn); shields and swords of the Greek pattern.

When the time came, they took position thus; on the right wing, the Vulture Dragoons and the king, with the bravest about him (we were among them); on the left, the Grassplumes; in the centre, the allies, in whatever formation they liked. The infantry came to about sixty million, and was deployed as follows. Spiders in that country are numerous and large, all of them far larger than the Cyclades islands. They were