'One may as well look for a needle in a Bottle of Hay as any of them in the daytime, they being lurking behind sand banks and bushes, except when we are marching towards the Fort, and then they appear like bees out in the month of June.' 'Besides which,' he continued, 'they point their guns well, and fire them well also.' (Tellicherry Factory Diary, March, 1761). They were, in short, brave light troops, excellent in skirmishing, but their organization into small bodies with discordant interests unfitted them to repel any serious invasion by an enemy even moderately well organised. Among other strange Malayali customs, Sheikh Zin-ud-din [123] noticed the fact that, if a chieftain was slain, his followers attacked and obstinately persevered in ravaging the slayer's country, and killing his people till their vengeance was satisfied. This custom is doubtless that which was described so long ago as in the ninth century A.D. by two Muhammadans, whose work was translated by Renaudot (Lond., 1733). 'There are kings who, upon their accession, observe the following ceremony. A quantity of cooked rice was spread before the king, and some three or four hundred persons came of their own accord, and received each a small quantity of rice from the king's own hands after he himself had eaten some. By eating of this rice they all engage themselves to burn themselves on the day the king dies or is slain, and they punctually fulfil their promise.' Men, who devoted themselves to certain death on great occasions, were termed Amoucos by the Portuguese; and Barbosa, one of the Portuguese writers, alluded to the practice as prevalent among the Nayars. Purchas has also the following:--'The king of Cochin hath a great number of Gentlemen, which he calleth Amocchi, and some are called Nairi: these two sorts of men esteem not their lives anything, so that it may be for the honour of the king.' The proper Malayalam term for such men was Chaver, literally those who took up, or devoted themselves to death. It was a custom of the Nayars, which was readily adopted by the Mappillas, who also at times--as at the great Mahamakkam, twelfth year feast, at Tirunavayi [124]--devoted themselves to death in the company of Nayars for the honour of the Valluvanad Raja. And probably the frantic fanatical rush of the Mappillas on British bayonets, which is not even yet a thing of the past, is the latest development of this ancient custom of the Nayars. The martial spirit of the Nayars in these piping times of peace has quite died out for want of exercise. The Nayar is more and more becoming a family man. Comparatively few of them now-a-days even engage in hunting." According to an inscription of the King Kulottunga I (A.D. 1083-84), he conquered Kudamalai-Nadu, i.e., the western hill country (Malabar), whose warriors, the ancestors of the Nayars of the present day, perished to the last man in defending their independence. [125]