Above the noise of the water , as it swirled round the elephant 's legs , Little Toomai could hear more splashing and some trumpeting both upstream and down -- great grunts and angry snortings , and all the mist about him seemed to be full of rolling , wavy shadows . `` Ai ! '' he said , half aloud , his teeth chattering . `` The elephant-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 XXXXX 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 .
clearing climb count dance elephants head moonlight nothing trees way