Notwithstanding their inimitable skill in the arts of attack and defence the heroes do not get off unscathed. In a single fight one of them might be pierced with any number of arrows, from one or two to five hundred or a thousand[101] as the case might be, yet, usually, the chiefs seem hardly the worse for the punishment. Indeed the poets love to depict their dauntless favourites bristling with arrows and streaming with blood, when they resemble in beauty blossoming _kincukas_ in spring-time, or “clouds tinged with the rays of the sun.” One warrior with three arrows fixed in his forehead is likened to Mount Meru with its triple summits of gold; another, with a circle of sharp arrows lodged in his ample breast, resembles “the sun with his rays at mid-day.” Odds are of no account when the heroes are once carried away with ungovernable fury, roaring tremendously, and “licking the corners of their mouths like lions in the forest.” Bhima on foot with his club in his hand, is, under such conditions, a match for whole armies, through which he rages, with leonine roars, crushing chariots and horses under his blows and smashing luckless elephants and their riders by thousands, himself bespattered with the blood, fat and marrow of his slaughtered foes; resembling, as the poet tells us, the Destroyer himself, with wide open mouth, as he appears at the end of the _yuga_. Similarly Arjuna, when attacked simultaneously by forty thousand charioteers and hemmed in by them, kills the entire number of his rash assailants with arrows from Gandiva. When Yudhisthira, ordinarily cold-blooded, blazed up with wrath on the battle-field, “the thought that arose in the minds of all creatures was that this king excited with rage will to-day consume the three worlds.” Bhisma, too, and Drona, and many another hero semi-divine or only mortal, seems, in his turn, quite irresistible, and carries everything before him when excited to mad (_Berserk_) fury. The dire confusion caused by the vast multitudes of resolute combatants, the blind rage and terror of thousands of wounded elephants and horses trampling wildly through the midst of friends and foes, the deafening uproar of the strife, where the tumultuous shouts and cries of contending warriors mingled with the clash of arms, the twang of bow-strings, the blare of trumpets, and the bellowing of elephants, are all vividly pictured by the poet of Kurukshetra.