Page 196 - THE JUNGLE BOOK

The Jungle Book

There was one blast of furious trumpeting from the
lines, and then the silence shut down on everything, and
Kala Nag began to move. Sometimes a tuft of high grass
washed along his sides as a wave washes along the sides of

a ship, and sometimes a cluster of wild-pepper vines
would scrape along his back, or a bamboo would creak
where his shoulder touched it. But between those times he
moved absolutely without any sound, drifting through the
thick Garo forest as though it had been smoke. He was
going uphill, but though Little Toomai watched the stars
in the rifts of the trees, he could not tell in what direction.
Then Kala Nag reached the crest of the ascent and
stopped for a minute, and Little Toomai could see the tops
of the trees lying all speckled and furry under the
moonlight for miles and miles, and the blue-white mist
over the river in the hollow. Toomai leaned forward and
looked, and he felt that the forest was awake below him—
awake and alive and crowded. A big brown fruit-eating
bat brushed past his ear; a porcupine’s quills rattled in the
thicket; and in the darkness between the tree stems he
heard a hog-bear digging hard in the moist warm earth,
and snuffing as it digged.
Then the branches closed over his head again, and Kala
Nag began to go down into the valley—not quietly this

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