The new elephants strained at their ropes, and squealed and trumpeted
from time to time, and he could hear his mother in the camp hut putting
his small brother to sleep with an old, old song about the great God
Shiv, who once told all the animals what they should eat. It is a very
soothing lullaby, and the first verse says:
Shiv, who poured the harvest and made the winds to blow,
Sitting at the doorways of a day of long ago,
Gave to each his portion, food and toil and fate,
From the King upon the _guddee_ to the Beggar at the gate.
All things made he--Shiva the Preserver.
Mahadeo! Mahadeo! He made all--
Thorn for the camel, fodder for the kine,
And mother s heart for sleepy head, O little son of mine!
Little Toomai came in with a joyous tunk-a-tunk at the end of each
verse, till he felt sleepy and stretched himself on the fodder at Kala
Nag s side. At last the elephants began to lie down one after another
as is their custom, till only Kala Nag at the right of the line was
left standing up; and he rocked slowly from side to side, his ears put
forward to listen to the night wind as it blew very slowly across the
hills. The air was full of all the night noises that, taken together,
make one big silence--the click of one bamboo stem against the other,
the rustle of something alive in the undergrowth, the scratch and squawk
of a half-waked bird (birds are awake in the night much more often than
we imagine), and the fall of water ever so far away. Little Toomai slept
for some time, and when he waked it was brilliant moonlight, and Kala
Nag was still standing up with his ears cocked. Little Toomai turned,
rustling in the fodder, and watched the curve of his big back against
half the stars in heaven, and while he watched he heard, so far away
that it sounded no more than a pinhole of noise pricked through the
stillness, the hoot-toot of a wild elephant.
All the elephants in the lines jumped up as if they had been shot, and
their grunts at last waked the sleeping mahouts, and they came out and
drove in the picket pegs with big mallets, and tightened this rope and
knotted that till all was quiet. One new elephant had nearly grubbed up
his picket, and Big Toomai took off Kala Nag s leg chain and shackled
that elephant fore-foot to hind-foot, but slipped a loop of grass string
round Kala Nag s leg, and told him to remember that he was tied fast. He
108