Chapter 35

They Visit The Lords Piko And Hello

In good time, we landed at Diranda. And that landing was like landing
at Greenwich among the Waterloo pensioners. The people were docked
right and left; some without arms; some without legs; not one with a
tail; but to a man, all had heads, though rather the worse for wear;
covered with lumps and contusions.

Now, those very magnificent and illustrious lord seigniors, the lord
seigniors Hello and Piko, lived in a palace, round which was a fence
of the cane called Malacca, each picket helmed with a skull, of which
there were fifty, one to each cane. Over the door was the blended arms
of the high and mighty houses of Hello and Piko: a Clavicle crossed
over an Ulna.

Escorted to the sign of the Skull-and-Cross-Bones, we received the
very best entertainment which that royal inn could afford. We found
our hosts Hello and Piko seated together on a dais or throne, and now
and then drinking some claret-red wine from an ivory bowl, too large
to have been wrought from an elephant's tusk. They were in glorious
good spirits, shaking ivory coins in a skull.

"What says your majesty?" said Piko. "Heads or tails?"

"Oh, heads, your majesty," said Hello.

"And heads say I," said Piko.

And heads it was. But it was heads on both sides, so both were sure
to win.

And thus they were used to play merrily all day long; beheading the
gourds of claret by one slicing blow with their sickle-shaped
scepters. Wide round them lay empty calabashes, all feathered, red
dyed, and betasseled, trickling red wine from their necks, like the
decapitated pullets in the old baronial barn yard at Kenilworth, the
night before Queen Bess dined with my lord Leicester.

The first compliments over; and Media and Taji having met with a
reception suitable to their rank, the kings inquired, whether there
were any good javelin-flingers among us: for if that were the case,
they could furnish them plenty of sport. Informed, however, that none
of the party were professional warriors, their majesties looked rather
glum, and by way of chasing away the blues, called for some good old
stuff, that was red.

It seems, this soliciting guests, to keep their spears from decaying,
by cut and thrust play with their subjects, was a very common thing
with their illustrious majesties.

But if their visitors could not be prevailed upon to spear a subject
or so, our hospitable hosts resolved to have a few speared, and
otherwise served up for our special entertainment. In a word, our
arrival furnished a fine pretext for renewing their games; though, we
learned, that only ten days previous, upward of fifty combatants had
been slain at