They made the Gond welcome with what they had , and he stood on one leg , his bow in his hand , and two or three poisoned arrows stuck through his top-knot , looking half afraid and half contemptuously at the anxious villagers and their ruined fields . They wished to know whether his Gods -- the Old Gods -- were angry with them and what sacrifices should be offered . The Gond said nothing , but picked up a trail of the Karela , the vine that bears the bitter wild gourd , and laced it to and fro across the temple door in the face of the staring red Hindu image . Then he pushed with his hand in the open air along the road to Khanhiwara , and went back to his Jungle , and watched the Jungle People drifting through it . He knew that when the Jungle moves only white men can hope to turn it aside . There was no need to ask his meaning . The wild gourd would grow where they had worshipped their God , and the sooner they saved themselves the better . But it is hard to tear a village from its moorings . They stayed on as long as any summer food was left to them , and they tried to gather nuts in the Jungle , but shadows with glaring eyes watched them , and rolled before them even at mid-day ; and when they ran back afraid to their walls , on the tree-trunks they had passed not five minutes before the bark would be stripped and chiselled with the stroke of some great taloned paw . The more they kept to their village , the bolder grew the wild things that gambolled and bellowed on the grazing-grounds by the Waingunga . They had no time to patch and plaster the rear walls of the empty byres that backed on to the Jungle ; the wild pig trampled them down , and the knotty-rooted vines hurried after and threw their elbows over the new-won ground , and the coarse grass bristled behind the vines like the lances of a goblin army following a retreat . The unmarried men ran away first , and carried the news far and near that the village was doomed . Who could fight , they said , against the Jungle , or the Gods of the Jungle , when the very village cobra had left his hole in the platform under the peepul-tree ? So their little commerce with the outside world shrunk as the trodden paths across the open grew fewer and fainter . At last the nightly trumpetings of Hathi and his three sons ceased to trouble them ; for they had no more to be robbed of . The crop on the ground and the seed in the ground had been taken . The outlying fields were already losing their shape , and it was time to throw themselves on the charity of the English at Khanhiwara . Native fashion , they delayed their departure from one day to another till the first Rains caught them and the unmended roofs let in a flood , and the grazing-ground stood ankle deep , and all life came on with a rush after the heat of the summer . Then they waded out -- men , women , and children -- through the blinding hot rain of the morning , but turned naturally for one farewell look at their homes . They heard , as the last burdened family filed through the gate , a crash of falling beams and thatch behind the walls .
They saw a shiny , snaky black trunk lifted for an instant , scattering sodden XXXXX .
Gods Gond Hindu Jungle Karela crash first grazing-grounds thatch tree-trunks