"Then go to her neck—oh, Thou Healer-without-fear! She will not wait long—she follows Nut Kut, the demon! and Gunpat Rao, who both got away with everything on!"
Still hoping, the Gul Moti slipped over the edge of the big howdah and climbed toward Mitha Baba's neck. The mahouts worked fast stripping her. Then Mitha Baba flung her head, striding away from their puny fingers, and plunged into the river. Sinking at first enough to wet the Gul Moti a little, she rose beautifully as she found her swimming stroke.
Day went by—and no elephants in sight. Night came on—and no elephants in sight. Mitha Baba rolled across the Nerbudda valley, as confident of her way as if she travelled the great Highway-of-all-India. She began to climb into the rising country beyond, as certain of her steps as if she were coming in to her own stockades. The Gul Moti took up her call again—thinking of the caravan they were following. But Mitha Baba was not thinking of the caravan. It had happened that the Gul Moti's tones had fallen upon those intonations used in High Himalaya, to send the toilers out to toil wild elephants in.
It was night-time, before the moon came up, when a strange elephant crashed past them—lunging in the opposite direction. It reeled as it ran and went down on its knees; evidently having been done to death in a fight. But the outline of it, in the shadows, appeared too lean to be one of her own.
Soon after that, Mitha Baba trumpeted in a new tone of voice—one the Gul
Moti had never heard before. It sounded very wild, very desolate.
"In the name of all the gods, Mitha Baba, what's the meaning of that?" the Gul Moti enquired with a little tension—it being one of those moments when one gains assurance by speech.
But Mitha Baba's reply was in the very oldest language of India—one even the mahouts know only a very little of. It rose in wild, wistful tones—higher and higher. It was repeated from time to time; the sense of it strangely thrilling to the girl on her neck.
. . . They were well up in the mountains, so far that the trees had become massive of body and heavy and dense of top—the moon only just showing through—when they heard the trumpeting of elephants, off toward the east. Mitha Baba answered at once, turning abruptly toward the east.
"Mitha Baba!" the Gul Moti protested, "our people have never gone off in this direction—where are we, anyway?"
Mitha Baba's calling was just as wild as before; but it had become wild exultation.