I chanced to come that time along the coast
and heard the guns for two or three days and nights successively."
The English traveller, whose account I have quoted, did not himself
witness the festival he describes, though he heard the sound of the
firing in the distance. Fortunately, exact records of these
festivals and of the number of men who perished at them have been
preserved in the archives of the royal family at Calicut. In the
latter part of the nineteenth century they were examined by Mr. W.
Logan, with the personal assistance of the reigning king, and from
his work it is possible to gain an accurate conception both of the
tragedy and of the scene where it was periodically enacted down to
1743, when the ceremony took place for the last time.
The festival at which the king of Calicut staked his crown and his
life on the issue of battle was known as the "Great Sacrifice." It
fell every twelfth year, when the planet Jupiter was in retrograde
motion in the sign of the Crab, and it lasted twenty-eight days,
culminating at the time of the eighth lunar asterism in the month of
Makaram.
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