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Just as I expected to see the fatal crash come, the huge brutes turned round, and off they went once more to take shelter under the trees in the centre of the corral. One after the other, the wild elephants were bound in much the same way as was the first. What appeared to me very wonderful, was that the wild ones never molested the mahouts or cooroowes who rode on the backs of the tame elephants.
We have seen you work this day; and the fame of it will go before and after you, the length and breadth of India among the mahouts." He turned, pointing toward the elephant regiment. Many mahouts were shouting something together; their right hands flung high. "It is right for you to know," the master-mahout went on, "that mahouts are a kind of men by themselves apart.
All the elephants in the lines jumped up as if they had been shot, and their grunts at last waked the sleeping mahouts, and they came out and drove in the picket pegs with big mallets, and tightened this rope and knotted that till all was quiet.
If the Colonel knew, what would he say?" "But but " cried Morris. "My dear boys, pray, pray come down! Think of the consequences to yourselves and what will be said to me." "Oh, it's all right, Mr Morris," cried Glyn confidently; "we must take the elephant now. Singh and I have ridden on elephants hundreds of times, though we have never acted the parts of mahouts.
Advancing to within a few feet of the master-mahout, she stood facing him, teetering her whole body from side to side, swinging her chain as she rolled. Horace flashed away and ran in among the massed elephants and mahouts. Coming back to Skag, he said breathlessly: "A mahout says the other one went before we came! That means, if Nut Kut comes there'll be no one to manage him.
Ominously quiet questions went up to the mahouts; and the mahouts were full-ready to answer! In the end, it sounded like a wild Himalayan chant about Neela Deo's great fight to save Gunpat Rao. The people listened patiently, till an inward meaning enlightened them. Then they exulted: "Neela Deo, Neela Deo, King of all elephants!"
He was doing it over again, for them. The mahouts laughed, calling their strange mountain calls; and the people went quite mad. Even the English taxidermist who had taken the trouble to sew and roughly stuff that mangled tiger-skin for the mahouts even he shouted with them.
Then the elephants began to come out of a big shed that was in the back of the yard, and the little boys saw that some of the elephants had mahouts, or drivers, on them but the most of them didn't have any drivers.
Chunerbutty, in whom old racial instincts were rekindled, had scarcely been able to restrain himself from climbing down and joining in the frenzied rush on the bull. But the turn of events sobered him and induced him to listen at last to Noreen's entreaties and angry demands from the Englishmen who bade him order the mahouts to take the visitors away from the horrible spectacle.
Really, they go on their own honour; because men have no power to control them only with their voices. You know Government doesn't permit elephants to be shot, for anything only in case one is court-martialled and sentenced to die." "Don't the mahouts ever punish them?" Skag asked. "They're not allowed to torture them never mind what!
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