e 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 thatch. It
disappeared, and there was another cr