st in me, but I
suspected the orders of the Empress in this matter, and had a curiosity
to see her scheme. So I stepped into the warder's lodge, and on into
the galleries which commanded the circus with their arrow-slits. The old
builders of the place had intended these for a second line of defence,
for, supposing the outer doors all forced, an enemy could be speedily
shot down in the circus, without being able to give a blow in return,
and so would only march into a death-trap. But as a gazing-place on a
spectacle they were no less useful.

The circus was bright lit by the moonlight, and the air which came in to
me from it was acrid with the reek of blood. There was no sport in
what was going forward: as I said, it was mere killing, and the sight
disgusted me. I am no prude about this matter. Give a prisoner his
weapons, put him in a pit with beasts of reasonable strength, and let
him fight to a finish if you choose, and I can look on there and applaud
the strokes. The war prisoner, being a prisoner, has earned death by
natural law, and prefers to get his last stroke in hot blood than to
be knocked down by the headsman's axe. And it is any brave man's luxury
either to help or watch a lusty fight. But this baiting in the circus
between the gates was no fair battle like that.

To begin with, the beasts were no fair antagonists for single men. In
fact, twenty men armed might well have fled from them. When the warder
said tigers, I supposed he meant the great cats of the woods. But here,
in the circus, I saw a pair of the most terrific of all the fur-bearing
land beasts, the great tigers of the caves--huge monsters, of such
ponderous strength that in hunger they will oftentimes drag down a
mammoth, if they can find him away from his herd.

How they had been brought captive I could not tell. Hunter of beasts
though I had been for all my days, I take no shame in saying that
I always approached the slaying of a cave-tiger with stratagem and
infinite caution. To entrap it alive and bring it to a city on a chain
was beyond my most daring schemes, and I have been accredited with more
new things than one. But here it was in fact, and I saw in these captive
beasts a new certificate for Phorenice's genius.

The purpose of these two cave-tigers was plain: whilst they were in
the circus, and loose, no living being could cross from one gate to
the other. They were a new and sturdy addition to the defences of the
capital. A collar