Elephants are greatly used in battle. The men on foot are sent first, the Khorassanians being mounted in full armour, man as well as horse. Large scythes are attached to the trunks and tusks of the elephants, and the animals are clad in ornamental plates of steel. They carry a citadel, and in the citadel twelve men in armour with guns and arrows. There is a place Shikhbaludin Peratyr, a bazaar Aladinand, and a fair once a year, where people from all parts of India assemble and trade for ten days. As many as 20,000 horses are brought there for sale from Beder, which is 20 kors distant, and besides every description of goods; and that fair is the best throughout the land of Hindostan. Everything is sold or bought in memory of Shikhbaludin, whose fête falls on the Russian festival of the Protection of the Holy Virgin (1st October). In that Aland (Aladinand?) there is a bird, gukuk, that flies at night and cries gukuk, and any roof it lights upon, there the man will die; and whoever attempts to kill it will see fire flashing from its beak. Wild cats rove at night and catch fowls; they live in the hills and among stones. As to monkeys, they live in the woods and have their monkey knyaz, who is attended by a host of armed followers. When any of them is caught they complain to their knyaz, and an army is sent after the missing; and when they come to a town they pull down the houses and beat the people; and their armies, it is said, are many. They speak their own tongues and bring forth a great many children; and when a child is unlike its father or its mother, it is thrown out on the highroad. Thus they are often caught by the Hindoos, who teach them every sort of handicraft, or sell them at night, that they might not find their way home, or teach them dancing.--From _India in the Fifteenth Century_, in the Hakluyt Society Publications, London, 1857. FOOTNOTES: [113] A thousand-man of the Russian army. [114] Probably a mistake for Kaffa in the Crimea. Apocryphal Legends about King Solomon. (XV. century.) Among the many apocryphal stories of the Old Testament that were current in Russia the largest number centre about King Solomon. They are mostly derived from Byzantine sources which, in their turn, are often based on Jewish apocryphal accounts; thus the _Story of Kitovrás_ (evidently transformed from Centaurus) is also given in the Talmud. Kitovrás is mentioned in Russian literature in the fourteenth century, but the following passage is from a manuscript of the fifteenth. THE STORY OF KITOVRÁS