strangling exultation in
mighty shouts. The elephants raised their big heads, threw high their
trumpets and rent the leagues of outer night--as if calling to their
brothers in the Vindha Hills.

The next part of the celebration was to happen suddenly. The mahouts
had planned it in sheer boyishness; and to their mountain hearts it
meant something like the clown-play in a western circus. Its success
depended on whether Neela Deo had enough foolishness in him--to play
the game. So now they wheeled the elephants into their stations again,
just in time before one section of the enclosure folded down flat on
the ground. This left that part open to the outside world; for the
shrubs that used to grow thick at the feet of the tamarisk trees had
been rooted up and green tenting-cloth stretched in their place. One
shrub still grew in the midst of that opening.

Neela Deo stopped short one moment--frozen so still that he looked like
a granite image--then, feeling toward the shrub with his trumpet tip an
instant only, flung up his head with a joyous squeal and was upon it
before a man could think. The shrub melted to pulp under his tramping
feet. Then they saw the black and yellow stripes of the tiger he had
killed in this same way--tramping, tramping. He was doing it over
again, for them.

The mahouts laughed, calling their strange mountain calls; and the
people went quite mad. Even the English taxidermist who had taken the
trouble to sew and roughly stuff that mangled tiger-skin for the
mahouts--even he shouted with them. Every time Neela Deo put that
little quirk into his trunk and slanted his head in that absurd
angle--Neela Deo, whose smooth dignity had never shown a wrinkle
before--they broke out afresh.

This clown-play certainly brought the people back to earth; but it did
something queer to the elephants. Having learned to know human voices,
they had already felt the mounting excitement; they had already been
tamping the ground with hard driving strokes, as if making speed on the
open highway--for some time. But in this abandonment to amusement,
this joyous unrestraint, they must have found some reminder. They did
not have Neela Deo's sense of humour. But they must have remembered
the unwalled distances of their own Hills--the hedge of shrubs had been
taken away; the tall slender tamarisk trees still standing, made no
obstruction. Beyond the waning torches they must have looked and seen
the quenchless