The gaming-board suggested the lighter and more innocent side of the palace life. A darker and more tragic aspect of it was hinted at by the fresco which was found in the following season among debris fallen from a chamber overlooking the so-called Court of the Olive Spout. This was a picture of those sports of the arena in which the Minoan and Mycenaean monarchs evidently took such delight, and in which the main figures were great bulls and toreadors. In this case the picture is one of three toreadors, two girls and a boy, with a single bull. The girls are distinguished by their white skins, their more vari-coloured costumes, their blue and red diadems, and their curlier hair, but are otherwise dressed like their male companion. In the centre of the picture the great bull is seen in full charge. The boy toreador has succeeded in catching the monster's horns and turning a clean somersault over his back, while one of the girls holds out her hands to catch his as he comes to the ground. But the other girl, standing in front of the bull, is just at the critical moment of the cruel sport. The great horns are almost passing under her arms, and it looks almost an even chance whether she will be able to catch them and vault, as her companion has done, over the bull's back, or whether she will fail and be gored to death. With such a sport, in which life or death depended upon an instant, in which a slip of the foot, a misjudgment of distance, or a wavering of hand or eye meant horrible destruction, we may be sure that the tragedies of the Minoan bull-ring were many and terrible, and that the fair dames of the Knossian Palace, modern in costume and appearance as they seem to us, were as habituated to scenes of cruel bloodshed as any Roman lady who watched the sports of the Colosseum, and saw gladiators hack one another to pieces for her pleasure. That the sport of the bull-ring, and particularly this exciting and dangerous game of bull-grappling, or [Greek: taurokathapsia], was an established and habitual form of Minoan sport is proved by the multitude of representations of it which have survived. The charging bull of Tiryns, the first to be discovered, was a mystery so long as it stood alone; but it is only one of a succession of such pictures--painted upon walls, engraved upon gems, and stamped on seal impressions--which show that the Cretans and Mycenaeans were as fond of their bull-fights as a modern Spaniard of his.