At last there was no sound of any more elephants moving in 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.

Still lying down, Little Toomai looked down upon scores and scores of broad backs, and wagging ears, and tossing trunks, and little rolling eyes.  He heard the click of tusks as they crossed other tusks by accident, and the dry rustle of trunks twined together, and the chafing of enormous sides and shoulders in the crowd, and the incessant flick and hissh of the great tails.  Then a cloud came over the moon, and he sat in black darkness.  But the quiet, steady hustling and pushing and gurgling went on just the same.  He knew that there were elephants all round Kala Nag, and that there was no chance of backing him out of the assembly; so he set his teeth and shivered.  In a Keddah at least there was torchlight 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 trumpeted, and they all took it up for five or ten terrible seconds.  The dew from the trees above spattered down like rain on the unseen backs, and a dull booming noise began, not very loud at first, and Little Toomai could not tell what it was.  But it grew and grew, and Kala Nag lifted up one forefoot and then the other, and brought them down on the ground—­one-two, one-two, as steadily as trip-hammers.  The elephants were stamping all together 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 booming went on, and the ground rocked and shivered, and Little Toomai 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 Kala Nag and all the others surge forward a few strides, and the thumping would change to the crushing sound of juicy 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 Kala Nag moved forward, still tramping, and he could not tell where he was in the clearing.  There was no sound from the elephants, except once, when two or three little calves squeaked together.  Then he heard a thump and a shuffle, and the booming went on.  It must have lasted fully two hours, and Little Toomai ached in every nerve, but he knew by the smell of the night air that the dawn was coming.

The morning broke in one sheet of pale yellow behind the green hills, and the booming stopped with the first ray, as though the light had been an order.  Before Little Toomai had got the ringing out of his head, before even he had shifted his position, there was not an elephant in sight except Kala Nag, Pudmini, and the elephant with the rope-galls, and there was neither sign nor rustle nor whisper down the hillsides to show where the others had gone.