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
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 f