Sahib s pet elephant, her chain snapped short off, grunting, snuffling
up the hillside. She must have broken her pickets and come straight from
Petersen Sahib s camp; and Little Toomai saw another elephant, one that
he did not know, with deep rope galls on his back and breast. He, too,
must have run away from some camp in the hills about.
At last there was no sound of any more elephants moving in the forest,
and Kala Nag rolled out from his station between the trees and went into
the middle of the crowd, clucking and gurgling, and all the elephants
began to talk in their own tongue, and to move about.
Still lying down, Little Toomai looked down upon scores and scores of
broad backs, and wagging ears, and tossing trunks, and little rolling
eyes. He heard the click of tusks as they crossed other tusks by
accident, and the dry rustle of trunks twined together, and the chafing
of enormous sides and shoulders in the crowd, and the incessant flick
and hissh of the great tails. Then a cloud came over the moon, and he
sat in black darkness. But the quiet, steady hustling and pushing and
gurgling went on just the same. He knew that there were elephants all
round Kala Nag, and that there was no chance of backing him out of the
assembly; so he set his teeth and shivered. In a Keddah at least there
was torchlight and shouting, but here he was all alone in the dark, and
once a trunk came up and touched him on the knee.
Then an elephant trumpeted, and they all took it up for five or ten
terrible seconds. The dew from the trees above spattered down like rain
on the unseen backs, and a dull booming noise began, not very loud at
first, and Little Toomai could not tell what it was. But it grew and
grew, and Kala Nag lifted up one forefoot and then the other, and
brought them down on the ground--one-two, one-two, as steadily as
trip-hammers. The elephants were stamping all together now, and it
sounded like a war drum beaten at the mouth of a cave. The dew fell from
the trees till there was no more left to fall, and the booming went on,
and the ground rocked and shivered, and Little Toomai put his hands up
to his ears to shut out the sound. But it was all one gigantic jar that
ran through him--this stamp of hundreds of heavy feet on the raw earth.
Once or twice he could feel Kala Nag and all the others surge forward
a few strides, and the thumping would change to the crushing sound of
juicy green things being bruised, but in a minute or two the boom
of feet on hard earth began again. A tree was creaking and groaning
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