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 XXXXX 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 .
At Once as behind beneath except in on up within