outside the clearing he could hear them crashing in the as they worked their way up the but as soon as they were within the circle of the tree trunks they moved like ghosts there were white wild with fallen leaves and nuts and twigs lying in the wrinkles of their necks and the folds of their ears fat slow footed she with restless little black only three or four feet high running under their young with their just beginning to show and very proud of them with their hollow anxious faces and trunks like rough bark savage old bull from shoulder to flank with great and cuts of fights and the dirt of their solitary mud dropping from of the their shoulders and there was one with a broken 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 knew that so long as he lay still on neck nothing would happen to him for even in the rush and scramble of a a wild elephant does not reach up with his trunk and drag a man off the neck of a tame elephant and these were not thinking of men that night once they started and put their ears forward when they heard the of a leg iron in the forest but it was s pet elephant her chain snapped short off up the she must have broken her and come straight from s camp and little saw another elephant one that he did not know with deep rope 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 moving in the forest and rolled out from his station between the trees and went the book into the middle of the crowd and and all the began to talk in their own tongue and to move about still lying down little looked down upon scores and scores of br ad backs and ears and tossing trunks and little rolling eyes he the click of as they crossed other by accident and the dry rustle of trunks together and the of enormous sides and shoulders in the crowd and the incessant and of the great tails then a cloud came over the moon and he sat in black darkness but the quiet steady and pushing and went on just the same he knew that there were all round and that there was no chance of him out of the assembly so he set his teeth and shivered in a at least there was torch light 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 and they all took it up for five or ten terrible seconds the dew from the trees above down like rain on the unseen backs and a dull noise began not very loud at first and little could not tell what it was but it grew and grew and lifted up one fore foot and then of the the other and brought them down on the ground � one two one two as steadily as trip the were stamping altogether 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 went on and the ground rocked and shivered and little 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 and all the others forward a few strides and the would change to the crushing sound of 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 moved forward still and he could not tell where he was in the clearing there was no sound from the except once when two or three little together then he heard a and a and the went on it must have lasted fully two hours and little ached in every nerve but he knew by the smell of the night air that the dawn was coming the book the morning broke in one sheet of pale yellow behind the green hills and the stopped with the first ray as though the light had been an order before little had got the ringing out of his head before even he had shifted his position there was not an elephant in sight except and the elephant with the rope and there was neither sign nor rustle nor whisper down the to show where the others had gone little 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 and the grass at the sides had been rolled back little stared once more now he understood the the had stamped out more room � had stamped the thick grass and cane to the into the into tiny and the into hard earth said little and his eyes were very heavy my lord let us keep by and go to s camp or i shall drop from thy neck the third elephant watched the two go away wheeled round and took his own path he may have belonged to some little native of the king s establishment fifty or sixty or a hundred miles away two hours later as was eating early breakfast his who had 