Before joining issue it was arranged between the hostile parties that only “persons equally circumstanced should encounter each other, fighting fairly;” that car-warriors should engage car-warriors; those on elephants should fight those similarly mounted; that horsemen should encounter horsemen, and foot-soldiers foot-soldiers. It was agreed that no one should strike a disarmed, a panic-stricken, or retreating foeman; that no blow should be given without due notice, and that stragglers, charioteers, and chariot-horses, and drummers, with a host of others, were not to be assailed on any account. It is almost needless to say that in the succession of battles which took place at Kurukshetra these generous covenants were never observed. They seem, indeed, to have been only a formal and somewhat farcical preliminary, drawn up in accordance, possibly, with some ideal but inoperative code of Kshatriya honour. While the hosts were assembling Vyasa presented himself before King Dhritarashtra and offered to restore the blind old king’s eyesight, but Dhritarashtra, unwilling to behold the bloodshed of his kinsfolk, declined the proffered boon, preferring that his charioteer, Sanjaya, should be enabled by the Rishi’s favour to survey any portion, however remote, of the field of battle, and relate all the events to him in the minutest and most circumstantial detail. As preparations for the approaching contest were pushed on many strange portents occurred. A shower of flesh and blood fell from the skies. Unusual solar and lunar eclipses took place. Earthquakes shook both land and ocean, and rivers were turned into blood. Revolting acts of immorality were being commonly committed. Some women were giving birth to five daughters at a time, who, as soon as they were born, began to dance and sing. Other women, as well as lower animals, were bringing forth strange monsters; and, as Vyasa assured the blind king, “The images of gods and goddesses sometimes laughed and sometimes trembled, sometimes vomited blood and sometimes fell down.”[94]