During the first ten days Bhisma commanded Dhritarashtra’s forces, while Karna held aloof in sullen indignation. A goodly volume is devoted to the incidents of these ten days, each of which seems to have had its own special heroes, who, under the influence of a sort of divine fury, like that attributed by the Norsemen to their _Berserkers_, carried everything before them. In picturing the events of these battles the Hindu bards have allowed their imaginations to run riot in a most incomprehensible way. Not only the demigods, but the merely human leaders (very little inferior to the demigods in martial qualities) in both armies, perform the most astonishing feats of arms, and display the most wonderful indifference to wounds. Sometimes a hero will shoot at his adversary arrows enough to envelop him completely and shroud him from view, or to darken the whole sky; but his antagonist, well skilled in the art of self-defence, will, with the greatest composure, stop those myriads of arrows[98] in mid-air with an equal or superior number of shafts from his own bow;[99] or, as Cikhandin did, cut in pieces with his dexterous sword the shower of arrows poured upon him. Sometimes a heavy mace, hurled by a powerful arm with well-directed aim, will whiz through the air towards some leader of men; but as it is hurtling along it will be cut into many fragments by crescent-headed arrows discharged at it with unerring skill, by the hero for whose destruction it was intended. Sometimes standards are brought down by sharp arrows, sometimes the bow is severed in a warrior’s hand by the shaft of an opponent, while horses and elephants, though cased in mail, fall easy victims to the archer’s skill. Occasionally, in pressing emergencies, superhuman weapons are called into requisition, and _mantras_ or spells are employed to give them more destructive force. Nor are the powers of producing strange illusions to terrify or baffle the foe neglected by those who possess them, namely, the Rakshasas in either army.[100] These terrible beings, capable of assuming any shape at will, and able to deceive their foes by strange illusions, would at one time raise up a spectral host of demons to terrify their opponents, and at another time, perhaps, paralyze them by producing before their startled eyes a false picture of their friends and allies lying cruelly slaughtered around them, or in headlong flight before the enemy.