nt-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