His massive body is a form for the emotion of rage and for the act of plunging. The forelegs are slight beneath the heft of his shoulders whence he tapers down, so that the shoulders and head are like a swinging turret. The brute is all infuriated flesh pivoting the exquisite ferocity of horns. They are slender and curved, needle-sharp, lance-long. The bull is aware of the strange ten-thousand-headed creature that shouts at him and drives its will upon him. He understands that the mob is his foe. He bellows, circles, plunges at last to reach it. The barrier jerks him up, splintering with his onslaught. He is bewildered and stopped, pawing the sand, while the mob prepares to send its single emissaries to engage him. The first act of the drama is formless and ends in farce. Toreros and banderilleros toy with the bull. They fling capes, side-step, dawdle with him. But gradually they withdraw the brute’s first fury from the indeterminate mob ringing him round to the accessible lives in the arena. The bull sees a horse. It capers before him in a blind presentiment of death. Its ears are tied, its eye is bandaged. Upon it a picador levels an enormous pike, steel-pointed. The bull charges and a horn sinks in the belly. Horse and rider rise and are flung in a clatter of bone, in a drench of flesh, against the barrier. The bull draws out his ensanguined horn and charges a banderillero whose cape is there protecting the picador. The crowd roars. The horse is whipped to its feet by grooms. The picador is hoisted back. The old nag’s entrails hang in a coiled horror within a foot of the ground. The horse is the comedian of the drama. The bull tosses him. He lies on his back and his four anguished legs beat like drumsticks on the barrier. Or, losing his saddle, he plunges mad and blind around the ring, kicking his own intestines, until death takes him. Or the bull mangles him at once, and he disappears in a swirl of flesh. This is farce; and also this is the sense of the immanence of danger. The bull is drunken with his victory. The crowd, beholding the fate of a horse, laughs with a tinge of terror. For what has happened there, may happen to a man. Enough horses have been slaughtered: their poor flesh shredded into the gleaming unconquerable sands. A bugle summons the second act of the drama. This is the scene of the banderilleros. They are the critics, the epigrammatists, the _graciosos_, the chorus of the accelerant play. They bespeak the bull. They test him. They show off his subtle points--and their own. If he has faults--clumsiness, cowardice, lethargy--they correct him. They call forth his finest rage; and as he plunges on them they leave gay ribboned darts within his flesh. If he is slow to anger, they will employ darts that explode beneath the skin of their victim. They enrage him. But all the while, they sober him as well, making him realize that the holiday of the horses is no more: a harder enemy is on the field.