The grass began to get squashy,and Kala Nag’s feet sucked and squelched as he put them down,and the night mist at the bottom of the valley chilled Little Toomai.There was a splash and a trample,and the rush of running water,and Kala Nag strode through the bed of a river,feeling his way at each step.Above the noise of the water,as it swirled round the elephant’s legs,Little Toomai could hear more splashing and some trumpeting both upstream and down--great grunts and angry snortings, and all the mist about him seemed to be full of rolling, wavy shadows.
“Ai!” he said, half aloud, his teeth chattering.“The elephant-folk are out tonight. It is the dance, then!”
Kala Nag swashed out of the water, blew his trunk clear,and began another climb.But this time he was not alone,and he had not to make his path. That was made already,six feet wide, in front of him,where the bent jungle-grass was trying to recover itself and stand up.Many elephants must have gone that way only a few minutes before.Little Toomai looked back,and behind him a great wild tusker with his little pig’s eyes glowing like hot coals was just lifting himself out of the misty river. Then the trees closed up again, and they went on and up, with trumpetings and crashings, and the sound of breaking branches on every side of them.
At last Kala Nag stood still between two tree-trunks at the very top of the hill. They were part of a circle of trees that grew round an irregular space of some three or four acres, and in all that space, as Little Toomai could see, the ground had been trampled down as hard as a brick floor. Some trees grew in the center of the clearing, but their bark was rubbed away, and the white wood beneath showed all shiny and 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 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 somewhere near him. He put out his arm and felt the bark, but Kala Nag moved forward, still tramping, and he could not tell where he was in the clearing. There was no sound from the elephants, except once, when two or three little calves squeaked together. Then he heard a thump and a shuffle, and the booming went on. It must have lasted fully two hours, and Little Toomai ached in every nerve, but he knew by the smell of the night air that the dawn was coming.
The morning broke in one sheet of pale yellow behind the green hills,and the booming stopped with the first ray,as though the light had been an order.Before Little Toomai had got the ringing out of his head,before even he had shifted his position,there was not an elephant in sight except Kala Nag,Pudmini, and the elephant with the rope-galls,and there was neither sign nor rustle nor whisper down the hillsides to show where the others had gone.
Little Toomai stared again and again. The clearing,as he remembered it, had grown in the night.More trees stood in the middle of it,but the undergrowth and the jungle grass at the sides had been rolled back.Little Toomai stared once more.Now he understood the trampling.The elephants had stamped out more room--had stamped the thick grass and juicy cane to trash, the trash into slivers, the slivers into tiny fibers, and the fibers into hard earth.