Meanwhile the Kauravas made an unexpected attack in another direction and began carrying off the royal herds. There was no one at the capital who could go out to oppose them--the troops being all away with the king--but the king’s son, Uttara, ventured out against the invaders with only Arjuna as his charioteer. At sight of the forces arrayed against him and the mighty heroes who led them, Uttara’s courage failed him, and leaping off his chariot he fled from the field, but was brought back by Arjuna who, directing him to take the reins, boldly resolved to give battle to the enemy. After providing himself with the famous and deadly weapons he had concealed a year previously in the _Sami_ tree near the cemetery, he went out alone, with Uttara as his charioteer, to attack the Kaurava host. All the redoubtable heroes of the party were present that day. Old Bhisma the terrible, and well skilled Drona with his mighty son Açwatháman, and Kripa and Karna the famous offspring of Kunti and the day-god. There too, arrayed in all the glittering panoply of war, were the formidable Duryodhana and his brother Dusçasana, with the other proud princes of Dhritarashtra’s race. But Arjuna alone, armed with his wonderful bow, Gándiva, completely defeated them all in one of those incomprehensible battles which delight the Hindu bard but bewilder the European reader. In the unfortunate rank and file of the Kaurava host the slaughter caused by Arjuna was prodigious; but not a single one of the leading heroes engaged in conflict that day was killed, or even seriously incommoded--although each of them, including Arjuna himself, was pierced by scores of deadly arrows. The defeated Kauravas, of course, recognized their conqueror; but the stipulated period of exile was now fully completed, and the enforced truce was at an end. Rajah Virata, now enlightened as to the names and proper rank of the Pandavas, engaged to assist them in regaining their Raj; though, after recent events, it is hard to comprehend what assistance such heroes could want from Virata, or anyone else. To cement the alliance between his royal house and that of the Pandavas, Virata offered his lovely daughter, Uttará, in marriage to Arjuna. That hero, however, had been the fair damsel’s dancing-master and on intimate terms with her in the harem. He, therefore, with fine delicacy of sentiment, declined the offer, lest suspicions injurious to the lady’s reputation might be whispered about; but, to attest her fair fame in the most conclusive and impressive way, he accepted her hand for his son, Abhimanyu, to whom she was duly married in the presence of an assembly of kings invited for the occasion, including Krishna, who came attended by a “hundred millions of horse and a hundred billions of foot-soldiers.”