polished in the patches of moonlight. There were creepers hanging from
the upper branches, and the bells of the flowers of the creepers, great
waxy white things like convolvuluses, hung down fast asleep. But
within the limits of the clearing there was not a single blade of
green--nothing but the trampled earth.
The moonlight showed it all iron gray, except where some elephants
stood upon it, and their shadows were inky black. Little Toomai looked,
holding his breath, with his eyes starting out of his head, and as he
looked, more and more and more elephants swung out into the open from
between the tree trunks. Little Toomai could only count up to ten, and
he counted again and again on his fingers till he lost count of the
tens, and his head began to swim. Outside the clearing he could hear
them crashing in the undergrowth as they worked their way up the
hillside, but as soon as they were within the circle of the tree trunks
they moved like ghosts.
There were white-tusked wild males, with fallen leaves and nuts and
twigs lying in the wrinkles of their necks and the folds of their ears;
fat, slow-footed she-elephants, with restless, little pinky black
calves only three or four feet high running under their stomachs; young
elephants with their tusks just beginning to show, and very proud of
them; lanky, scraggy old-maid elephants, with their hollow anxious
faces, and trunks like rough bark; savage old bull elephants, scarred
from shoulder to flank with great weals and cuts of bygone fights,
and the caked dirt of their solitary mud baths dropping from their
shoulders; and there was one with a broken tusk and the marks of the
full-stroke, the terrible drawing scrape, of a tiger s claws on his
side.
They were standing head to head, or walking to and fro across the ground
in couples, or rocking and swaying all by themselves--scores and scores
of elephants.
Toomai knew that so long as he lay still on Kala Nag s neck nothing
would happen to him, for even in the rush and scramble of a Keddah drive
a wild elephant does not reach up with his trunk and drag a man off the
neck of a tame elephant. And these elephants were not thinking of men
that night. Once they started and put their ears forward when they heard
the chinking of a leg iron in the forest, but it was Pudmini, Petersen
111