They fought so closely that the heads, hands, and feet of those on one side were touching the heads, hands, and feet of those on the other side; they shed so much blood on to the ground that it became hard to stand on it without slipping; and the river of Unsenn was filled with dead bodies, so hard and swift and bloody and cruel was the battle. Many great chiefs fell on each side. Ogma, the champion of the Tuatha Dé Danann, killed Indech, the son of the goddess Domnu. But, meanwhile, Balor of the Mighty Blows raged among the gods, slaying their king, Nuada of the Silver Hand, as well as Macha, one of his warlike wives. At last he met with Lugh. The sun-god shouted a challenge to his grandfather in the Fomorian speech. Balor heard it, and prepared to use his death-dealing eye. “Lift up my eyelid,” he said to his henchmen, “that I may see this chatterer who talks to me.” The attendants lifted Balor’s eye with a hook, and if the glance of the eye beneath had rested upon Lugh, he would certainly have perished. But, when it was half opened, Lugh flung a magic stone which struck Balor’s eye out through the back of his head. The eye fell on the ground behind Balor, and destroyed a whole rank of thrice nine Fomors who were unlucky enough to be within sight of it. An ancient poem has handed down the secret of this magic stone. It is there called a _tathlum_, meaning a “concrete ball” such as the ancient Irish warriors used sometimes to make out of the brains of dead enemies hardened with lime. “A tathlum, heavy, fiery, firm, Which the Tuatha Dé Danann had with them, It was that broke the fierce Balor’s eye, Of old, in the battle of the great armies. “The blood of toads and furious bears, And the blood of the noble lion, The blood of vipers and of Osmuinn’s trunks;— It was of these the tathlum was composed. “The sand of the swift Armorian sea, And the sand of the teeming Red Sea;— All these, being first purified, were used In the composition of the tathlum. “Briun, the son of Bethar, no mean warrior, Who on the ocean’s eastern border reigned;— It was he that fused, and smoothly formed, It was he that fashioned the tathlum. “To the hero Lugh was given This concrete ball,—no soft missile;— In Mag Tuireadh of shrieking wails, From his hand he threw the tathlum.”[137] This blinding of the terrible Balor turned the fortunes of the fight; for the Fomors wavered, and the Morrígú came and encouraged the people of the goddess Danu with a song, beginning “Kings arise to the battle”, so that they took fresh heart, and drove the Fomors headlong back to their country underneath the sea.