Presently, at the long table, just before everybody got too drunk to appreciate it, the tour de force of the evening was borne in on a narrow wooden platter the length of the table itself. Numerous liveried scullions staggered under it as if it were a monstrous millipede and they its red and sweating legs. It was one of those rare swamp-lizards, a young dinosaur, crouched as if to spring and with its magnificent tail tapering full of good fat out behind it. Its belly and stumpy bent legs rested on a mass of hot vegetables and spices. The smell of its passage filled the whole room as the bearers carried it among all the other tables to the long one. There was a lot of shouting; my teeth watered; people reached up and grabbed fist-large vegetables as the procession passed them.

It was placed on the long-table; and all the gentlemen there fell upon it and began to carve it up. There was rivalry for the best innards, and presently most of the gentlemen were all but in it. A golden slave brought a huge crystal flagon to the General: he bowed to the Hammerfist, to whom the slave presented the flagon. The Hammerfist held out his goblet to be filled, and, scrambling on to the table and standing there balanced on the vegetables, he flung his arms wide in a gesture that splattered most of the wine from his goblet and bellowed: “Drink to the Divine Downfall of Atlan!”

There was almost silence in the hall except for the ring of his bellow against the high rafters, and the gurgling, grunting and cursing of two men rolling, fighting for the heart at his feet in the gravied belly of the corpse.