Английский с Редьярдом Киплингом. Рикки-Тикки-Тави

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 elephants 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.

They were standing head to head (они стояли голова к голове), or walking to and fro across the ground in couples (или расхаживали взад и вперед по площадке парами;

to walk – ходить; гулять, прогуливаться), or rocking and swaying all by themselves (или же /ходили,/ спотыкаясь и покачиваясь, сами по себе = поодиночке; to rock – качаться, колебаться; трястись; to sway – качать/ся

/, колебать/ся/) – scores and scores of elephants (десятки и десятки слонов;

score – два десятка, десяток-другой).

Toomai knew that so long as he lay still on Kala Nag’s neck nothing would happen to him (Тумаи знал, что пока он неподвижно лежит на спине Кала Нага, с ним ничего не случится), for even in the rush and scramble of a Keddah drive a wild elephant does not reach up with his trunk and drag a man off the neck of a tame elephant (потому что, даже в толкотне и свалке кеддаха, дикий слон не вытягивает хобот и не стаскивает человека с шеи ручного слона; to reach – протягивать, вытягивать; to drag – тянуть, тащить, волочить

). And these elephants were not thinking of men that night (а эти слоны /вообще/ не думали о людях в ту ночь).

They were standing head to head, or walking to and fro across the ground in couples, or rocking and swaying all by themselves – scores and scores of elephants.

Toomai knew that so long as he lay still on Kala Nag’s neck nothing would happen to him, for even in the rush and scramble of a Keddah drive a wild elephant does not reach up with his trunk and drag a man off the neck of a tame elephant. And these elephants were not thinking of men that night.