"Yes."
"Well, ef dat ain't makin' money de easiest ever I struck! She jes'
rained in-never cos' us a lick o' work. Le's mosey right along, Mars Tom."
But Tom was thinking and ciphering away so busy and excited he never
heard him. Pretty soon he says:
"Five dollars-sho! Look here, this sand's worth-worth-why, it's worth
no end of money."
"How is dat, Mars Tom? Go on, honey, go on!"
"Well, the minute people knows it's genuwyne sand from the genuwyne
Desert of Sahara, they'll just be in a perfect state of mind to git hold
of some of it to keep on the what-not in a vial with a label on it for a
curiosity. All we got to do is to put it up in vials and float around all
over the United States and peddle them out at ten cents apiece. We've got
all of ten thousand dollars' worth of sand in this boat."
Me and Jim went all to pieces with joy, and begun to shout
whoopjamboreehoo, and Tom says:
"And we can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and
fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we've carted this whole
Desert over there and sold it out; and there ain't ever going to be any
opposition, either, because we'll take out a patent."
"My goodness," I says, "we'll be as rich as Creosote, won't we, Tom?"
"Yes-Creesus, you mean. Why, that dervish was hunting in that little
hill for the treasures of the earth, and didn't know he was walking over
the real ones for a thousand miles. He was blinder than he made the
driver."
"Mars Tom, how much is we gwyne to be worth?"
"Well, I don't know yet. It's got to be ciphered, and it ain't the
easiest job to do, either, because it's over four million square miles of
sand at ten cents a vial."
Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out considerable, and he shook
his head and says:
"Mars Tom, we can't 'ford all dem vials-a king couldn't. We better not
try to take de whole Desert, Mars Tom, de vials gwyne to bust us, sho'."
Tom's excitement died out, too, now, and I reckoned it was on account
of the vials, but it wasn't. He set there thinking, and got bluer and
bluer, and at last he says:
"Boys, it won't work; we got to give it up."
"Why, Tom?"
"On account of the duties."
I couldn't make nothing out of that, neither could Jim. I says:
"What IS our duty, Tom? Because if we can't git around it, why can't we
just DO it? People often has to."
But he says:
"Oh, it ain't that kind of duty. The kind I mean is a tax. Whenever you
strike a frontier-that's the border of a country, you know-you find a
customhouse there, and the gov'ment officers comes and rummages among your
things and charges a big tax, which they call a duty because it's their
duty to bust you if they can, and if you don't pay the duty they'll hog
your sand. They call it confiscating, but that don't deceive nobody, it's
just hogging, and that's all it is. Now if we try to carry this sand home
the way we're pointed now, we got to climb fences till we git tired-just
frontier after frontier-Egypt, Arabia, Hindostan, and so on, and they'll
all whack on a duty, and so you see, easy enough, we CAN'T go THAT road."
"Why, Tom," I says, "we can sail right over their old frontiers; how
are THEY going to stop us?"
He looked sorrowful at me, and says, very grave:
"Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest?"
I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said nothing, and he went on:
"Well, we're shut off the other way, too. If we go back the way we've
come, there's the New York custom-house, and that is worse than all of
them others put together, on account of the kind of cargo we've got."
"Why?"
"Well, they can't raise Sahara sand in America, of course, and when
they can't raise a thing there, the duty is fourteen hundred thousand per
cent. on it if you try to fetch it in from where they do raise it."
"There ain't no sense in that, Tom Sawyer."
"Who said there WAS? What do you talk to me like that for, Huck Finn?
You wait till I say a thing's got sense in it before you go to accusing me
of saying it."
"All right, consider me crying about it, and sorry. Go on."
Jim says:
"Mars Tom, do dey jam dat duty onto everything we can't raise in
America, en don't make no 'stinction 'twix' anything?"
"Yes, that's what they do."
"Mars Tom, ain't de blessin' o' de Lord de mos' valuable thing dey is?"
"Yes, it is."
"Don't de preacher stan' up in de pulpit en call it down on de people?"
"Yes."
"Whah do it come from?"
"From heaven."
"Yassir! you's jes' right, 'deed you is, honey-it come from heaven, en
dat's a foreign country. NOW, den! do dey put a tax on dat blessin'?"
"No, they don't."
"Course dey don't; en so it stan' to reason dat you's mistaken, Mars
Tom. Dey wouldn't put de tax on po' truck like san', dat everybody ain't
'bleeged to have, en leave it off'n de bes' thing dey is, which nobody
can't git along widout."
Tom Sawyer was stumped; he see Jim had got him where he couldn't budge.
He tried to wiggle out by saying they had FORGOT to put on that tax, but
they'd be sure to remember about it, next session of Congress, and then
they'd put it on, but that was a poor lame come-off, and he knowed it. He
said there warn't nothing foreign that warn't taxed but just that one, and
so they couldn't be consistent without taxing it, and to be consistent was
the first law of politics. So he stuck to it that they'd left it out
unintentional and would be certain to do their best to fix it before they
got caught and laughed at.
But I didn't feel no more interest in such things, as long as we
couldn't git our sand through, and it made me low-spirited, and Jim the
same. Tom he tried to cheer us up by saying he would think up another
speculation for us that would be just as good as this one and better, but
it didn't do no good, we didn't believe there was any as big as this. It
was mighty hard; such a little while ago we was so rich, and could 'a'
bought a country and started a kingdom and been celebrated and happy, and
now we was so poor and ornery again, and had our sand left on our hands.
The sand was looking so lovely before, just like gold and di'monds, and
the feel of it was so soft and so silky and nice, but now I couldn't bear
the sight of it, it made me sick to look at it, and I knowed I wouldn't
ever feel comfortable again till we got shut of it, and I didn't have it
there no more to remind us of what we had been and what we had got
degraded down to. The others was feeling the same way about it that I was.
I knowed it, because they cheered up so, the minute I says le's throw this
truck overboard.
Well, it was going to be work, you know, and pretty solid work, too; so
Tom he divided it up according to fairness and strength. He said me and
him would clear out a fifth apiece of the sand, and Jim threefifths. Jim
he didn't quite like that arrangement. He says:
"Course I's de stronges', en I's willin' to do a share accordin', but
by jings you's kinder pilin' it onto ole Jim, Mars Tom, hain't you?"
"Well, I didn't think so, Jim, but you try your hand at fixing it, and
let's see."
So Jim reckoned it wouldn't be no more than fair if me and Tom done a
TENTH apiece. Tom he turned his back to git room and be private, and then
he smole a smile that spread around and covered the whole Sahara to the
westward, back to the Atlantic edge of it where we come from. Then he
turned around again and said it was a good enough arrangement, and we was
satisfied if Jim was. Jim said he was.
So then Tom measured off our two-tenths in the bow and left the rest
for Jim, and it surprised Jim a good deal to see how much difference there
was and what a raging lot of sand his share come to, and said he was
powerful glad now that he had spoke up in time and got the first
arrangement altered, for he said that even the way it was now, there was
more sand than enjoyment in his end of the contract, he believed.
Then we laid into it. It was mighty hot work, and tough; so hot we had
to move up into cooler weather or we couldn't 'a' stood it. Me and Tom
took turn about, and one worked while t'other rested, but there warn't
nobody to spell poor old Jim, and he made all that part of Africa damp, he
sweated so. We couldn't work good, we was so full of laugh, and Jim he
kept fretting and wanting to know what tickled us so, and we had to keep
making up things to account for it, and they was pretty poor inventions,
but they done well enough, Jim didn't see through them. At last when we
got done we was 'most dead, but not with work but with laughing. By and by
Jim was 'most dead, too, but: it was with work; then we took turns and
spelled him, and he was as thankfull as he could be, and would set on the
gunnel and swab the sweat, and heave and pant, and say how good we was to
a poor old nigger, and he wouldn't ever forgit us. He was always the
gratefulest nigger I ever see, for any little thing you done for him. He
was only nigger outside; inside he was as white as you be.
THE next few meals was pretty sandy, but that don't make no difference
when you are hungry; and when you ain't it ain't no satisfaction to eat,
anyway, and so a little grit in the meat ain't no particular drawback, as
far as I can see.
Then we struck the east end of the Desert at last, sailing on a
northeast course. Away off on the edge of the sand, in a soft pinky light,
we see three little sharp roofs like tents, and Tom says:
"It's the pyramids of Egypt."
It made my heart fairly jump. You see, I had seen a many and a many a
picture of them, and heard tell about them a hundred times, and yet to
come on them all of a sudden, that way, and find they was REAL, 'stead of
imaginations, 'most knocked the breath out of me with surprise. It's a
curious thing, that the more you hear about a grand and big and bully
thing or person, the more it kind of dreamies out, as you may say, and
gets to be a big dim wavery figger made out of moonshine and nothing solid
to it. It's just so with George Washington, and the same with them
pyramids.
And moreover, besides, the thing they always said about them seemed to
me to be stretchers. There was a feller come to the Sunday-school once,
and had a picture of them, and made a speech, and said the biggest pyramid
covered thirteen acres, and was most five hundred foot high, just a steep
mountain, all built out of hunks of stone as big as a bureau, and laid up
in perfectly regular layers, like stair-steps. Thirteen acres, you see,
for just one building; it's a farm. If it hadn't been in Sunday-school, I
would 'a' judged it was a lie; and outside I was certain of it. And he
said there was a hole in the pyramid, and you could go in there with
candles, and go ever so far up a long slanting tunnel, and come to a large
room in the stomach of that stone mountain, and there you would find a big
stone chest with a king in it, four thousand years old. I said to myself,
then, if that ain't a lie I will eat that king if they will fetch him, for
even Methusalem warn't that old, and nobody claims it.
As we come a little nearer we see the yaller sand come to an end in a
long straight edge like a blanket, and on to it was joined, edge to edge,
a wide country of bright green, with a snaky stripe crooking through it,
and Tom said it was the Nile. It made my heart jump again, for the Nile
was another thing that wasn't real to me. Now I can tell you one thing
which is dead certain: if you will fool along over three thousand miles of
yaller sand, all glimmering with heat so that it makes your eyes water to
look at it, and you've been a considerable part of a week doing it, the
green country will look so like home and heaven to you that it will make
your eyes water AGAIN.
It was just so with me, and the same with Jim.
And when Jim got so he could believe it WAS the land of Egypt he was
looking at, he wouldn't enter it standing up, but got down on his knees
and took off his hat, because he said it wasn't fitten' for a humble poor
nigger to come any other way where such men had been as Moses and Joseph
and Pharaoh and the other prophets. He was a Presbyterian, and had a most
deep respect for Moses which was a Presbyterian, too, he said. He was all
stirred up, and says:
"Hit's de lan' of Egypt, de lan' of Egypt, en I's 'lowed to look at it
wid my own eyes! En dah's de river dat was turn' to blood, en I's looking
at de very same groun' whah de plagues was, en de lice, en de frogs, en de
locus', en de hail, en whah dey marked de door-pos', en de angel o' de
Lord come by in de darkness o' de night en slew de fust-born in all de
lan' o' Egypt. Ole Jim ain't worthy to see dis day!"
And then he just broke down and cried, he was so thankful. So between
him and Tom there was talk enough, Jim being excited because the land was
so full of history-Joseph and his brethren, Moses in the bulrushers, Jacob
coming down into Egypt to buy corn, the silver cup in the sack, and all
them interesting things; and Tom just as excited too, because the land was
so full of history that was in HIS line, about Noureddin, and Bedreddin,
and such like monstrous giants, that made Jim's wool rise, and a raft of
other Arabian Nights folks, which the half of them never done the things
they let on they done, I don't believe.
Then we struck a disappointment, for one of them early morning fogs
started up, and it warn't no use to sail over the top of it, because we
would go by Egypt, sure, so we judged it was best to set her by compass
straight for the place where the pyramids was gitting blurred and blotted
out, and then drop low and skin along pretty close to the ground and keep
a sharp lookout. Tom took the hellum, I stood by to let go the anchor, and
Jim he straddled the bow to dig through the fog with his eyes and watch
out for danger ahead. We went along a steady gait, but not very fast, and
the fog got solider and solider, so solid that Jim looked dim and ragged
and smoky through it. It was awful still, and we talked low and was
anxious. Now and then Jim would say:
"Highst her a p'int, Mars Tom, highst her!" and up she would skip, a
foot or two, and we would slide right over a flat-roofed mud cabin, with
people that had been asleep on it just beginning to turn out and gap and
stretch; and once when a feller was clear up on his hind legs so he could
gap and stretch better, we took him a blip in the back and knocked him
off. By and by, after about an hour, and everything dead still and we
a-straining our ears for sounds and holding our breath, the fog thinned a
little, very sudden, and Jim sung out in an awful scare:
"Oh, for de lan's sake, set her back, Mars Tom, here's de biggest giant
outen de 'Rabian Nights acomin' for us!" and he went over backwards in the
boat.
Tom slammed on the back-action, and as we slowed to a standstill a
man's face as big as our house at home looked in over the gunnel, same as
a house looks out of its windows, and I laid down and died. I must 'a'
been clear dead and gone for as much as a minute or more; then I come to,
and Tom had hitched a boathook on to the lower lip of the giant and was
holding the balloon steady with it whilst he canted his head back and got
a good long look up at that awful face.
Jim was on his knees with his hands clasped, gazing up at the thing in
a begging way, and working his lips, but not getting anything out. I took
only just a glimpse, and was fading out again, but Tom says:
"He ain't alive, you fools; it's the Sphinx!"
I never see Tom look so little and like a fly; but that was because the
giant's head was so big and awful. Awful, yes, so it was, but not dreadful
any more, because you could see it was a noble face, and kind of sad, and
not thinking about you, but about other things and larger. It was stone,
reddish stone, and its nose and ears battered, and that give it an abused
look, and you felt sorrier for it for that.
We stood off a piece, and sailed around it and over it, and it was just
grand. It was a man's head, or maybe a woman's, on a tiger's body a
hundred and twenty-five foot long, and there was a dear little temple
between its front paws. All but the head used to be under the sand, for
hundreds of years, maybe thousands, but they had just lately dug the sand
away and found that little temple. It took a power of sand to bury that
cretur; most as much as it would to bury a steamboat, I reckon.
We landed Jim on top of the head, with an American flag to protect him,
it being a foreign land; then we sailed off to this and that and t'other
distance, to git what Tom called effects and perspectives and proportions,
and Jim he done the best he could, striking all the different kinds of
attitudes and positions he could study up, but standing on his head and
working his legs the way a frog does was the best. The further we got
away, the littler Jim got, and the grander the Sphinx got, till at last it
was only a clothespin on a dome, as you might say. That's the way
perspective brings out the correct proportions, Tom said; he said Julus
Cesar's niggers didn't know how big he was, they was too close to him.
Then we sailed off further and further, till we couldn't see Jim at all
any more, and then that great figger was at its noblest, a-gazing out over
the Nile Valley so still and solemn and lonesome, and all the little
shabby huts and things that was scattered about it clean disappeared and
gone, and nothing around it now but a soft wide spread of yaller velvet,
which was the sand.
That was the right place to stop, and we done it. We set there
a-looking and a-thinking for a half an hour, nobody a-saying anything, for
it made us feel quiet and kind of solemn to remember it had been looking
over that valley just that same way, and thinking its awful thoughts all
to itself for thousands of years. and nobody can't find out what they are
to this day.
At last I took up the glass and see some little black things a-capering
around on that velvet carpet, and some more a-climbing up the cretur's
back, and then I see two or three wee puffs of white smoke, and told Tom
to look. He done it, and says:
"They're bugs. No-hold on; they-why, I believe they're men. Yes, it's
men-men and horses both. They're hauling a long ladder up onto the
Sphinx's back-now ain't that odd? And now they're trying to lean it up
a-there's some more puffs of smoke-it's guns! Huck, they're after Jim."
We clapped on the power, and went for them abiling. We was there in no
time, and come a-whizzing down amongst them, and they broke and scattered
every which way, and some that was climbing the ladder after Jim let go
all holts and fell. We soared up and found him laying on top of the head
panting and most tuckered out, partly from howling for help and partly
from scare. He had been standing a siege a long time-a week, HE said, but
it warn't so, it only just seemed so to him because they was crowding him
so. They had shot at him, and rained the bullets all around him, but he
warn't hit, and when they found he wouldn't stand up and the bullets
couldn't git at him when he was laying down, they went for the ladder, and
then he knowed it was all up with him if we didn't come pretty quick. Tom
was very indignant, and asked him why he didn't show the flag and command
them to GIT, in the name of the United States. Jim said he done it, but
they never paid no attention. Tom said he would have this thing looked
into at Washington, and says:
"You'll see that they'll have to apologize for insulting the flag, and
pay an indemnity, too, on top of it even if they git off THAT easy."
Jim says:
"What's an indemnity, Mars Tom?"
"It's cash, that's what it is."
"Who gits it, Mars Tom?"
"Why, WE do."
"En who gits de apology?"
"The United States. Or, we can take whichever we please. We can take
the apology, if we want to, and let the gov'ment take the money."
"How much money will it be, Mars Tom?"
"Well, in an aggravated case like this one, it will be at least three
dollars apiece, and I don't know but more."
"Well, den, we'll take de money, Mars Tom, blame de 'pology. Hain't dat
yo' notion, too? En hain't it yourn, Huck?"
We talked it over a little and allowed that that was as good a way as
any, so we agreed to take the money. It was a new business to me, and I
asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he
says:
"Yes; the little ones does."
We was sailing around examining the pyramids, you know, and now we
soared up and roosted on the flat top of the biggest one, and found it was
just like what the man said in the Sunday-school. It was like four pairs
of stairs that starts broad at the bottom and slants up and comes together
in a point at the top, only these stair-steps couldn't be clumb the way
you climb other stairs; no, for each step was as high as your chin, and
you have to be boosted up from behind. The two other pyramids warn't far
away, and the people moving about on the sand between looked like bugs
crawling, we was so high above them.
Tom he couldn't hold himself he was so worked up with gladness and
astonishment to be in such a celebrated place, and he just dripped history
from every pore, seemed to me. He said he couldn't scarcely believe he was
standing on the very identical spot the prince flew from on the Bronze
Horse. It was in the Arabian Night times, he said. Somebody give the
prince a bronze horse with a peg in its shoulder, and he could git on him
and fly through the air like a bird, and go all over the world, and steer
it by turning the peg, and fly high or low and land wherever he wanted to.
When he got done telling it there was one of them uncomfortable
silences that comes, you know, when a person has been telling a whopper
and you feel sorry for him and wish you could think of some way to change
the subject and let him down easy, but git stuck and don't see no way, and
before you can pull your mind together and DO something, that silence has
got in and spread itself and done the business. I was embarrassed, Jim he
was embarrassed, and neither of us couldn't say a word. Well, Tom he
glowered at me a minute, and says:
"Come, out with it. What do you think?"
I says:
"Tom Sawyer, YOU don't believe that, yourself."
"What's the reason I don't? What's to hender me?"
"There's one thing to hender you: it couldn't happen, that's all."
"What's the reason it couldn't happen?"
"You tell me the reason it COULD happen."
"This balloon is a good enough reason it could happen, I should reckon."
"WHY is it?"
"WHY is it? I never saw such an idiot. Ain't this balloon and the
bronze horse the same thing under different names?"
"No, they're not. One is a balloon and the other's a horse. It's very
different. Next you'll be saying a house and a cow is the same thing."
"By Jackson, Huck's got him ag'in! Dey ain't no wigglin' outer dat!"
"Shut your head, Jim; you don't know what you're talking about. And
Huck don't. Look here, Huck, I'll make it plain to you, so you can
understand. You see, it ain't the mere FORM that's got anything to do with
their being similar or unsimilar, it's the PRINCIPLE involved; and the
principle is the same in both. Don't you see, now?"
I turned it over in my mind, and says:
"Tom, it ain't no use. Principles is all very well, but they don't git
around that one big fact, that the thing that a balloon can do ain't no
sort of proof of what a horse can do."
"Shucks, Huck, you don't get the idea at all. Now look here a
minute-it's perfectly plain. Don't we fly through the air?"
"Yes."
"Very well. Don't we fly high or fly low, just as we please?"
"Yes."
"Don't we steer whichever way we want to?"
"Yes."
"And don't we land when and where we please?"
"Yes."
"How do we move the balloon and steer it?"
"By touching the buttons."
"NOW I reckon the thing is clear to you at last. In the other case the
moving and steering was done by turning a peg. We touch a button, the
prince turned a peg. There ain't an atom of difference, you see. I knowed
I could git it through your head if I stuck to it long enough."
He felt so happy he begun to whistle. But me and Jim was silent, so he
broke off surprised, and says:
"Looky here, Huck Finn, don't you see it YET?"
I says:
"Tom Sawyer, I want to ask you some questions."
"Go ahead," he says, and I see Jim chirk up to listen.
"As I understand it, the whole thing is in the buttons and the peg-the
rest ain't of no consequence. A button is one shape, a peg is another
shape, but that ain't any matter?"
"No, that ain't any matter, as long as they've both got the same power."
"All right, then. What is the power that's in a candle and in a match?"
"It's the fire."
"It's the same in both, then?"
"Yes, just the same in both."
"All right. Suppose I set fire to a carpenter shop with a match, what
will happen to that carpenter shop?"
"She'll burn up."
"And suppose I set fire to this pyramid with a candle-will she burn up?"
"Of course she won't."
"All right. Now the fire's the same, both times. WHY does the shop
burn, and the pyramid don't?"
"Because the pyramid CAN'T burn."
"Aha! and A HORSE CAN'T FLY!"
"My lan', ef Huck ain't got him ag'in! Huck's landed him high en dry
dis time, I tell you! Hit's de smartes' trap I ever see a body walk
inter-en ef I-"
But Jim was so full of laugh he got to strangling and couldn't go on,
and Tom was that mad to see how neat I had floored him, and turned his own
argument ag'in him and knocked him all to rags and flinders with it, that
all he could manage to say was that whenever he heard me and Jim try to
argue it made him ashamed of the human race. I never said nothing; I was
feeling pretty well satisfied. When I have got the best of a person that
way, it ain't my way to go around crowing about it the way some people
does, for I consider that if I was in his place I wouldn't wish him to
crow over me. It's better to be generous, that's what I think.
BY AND BY we left Jim to float around up there in the neighborhood of
the pyramids, and we clumb down to the hole where you go into the tunnel,
and went in with some Arabs and candles, and away in there in the middle
of the pyramid we found a room and a big stone box in it where they used
to keep that king, just as the man in the Sunday-school said; but he was
gone, now; somebody had got him. But I didn't take no interest in the
place, because there could be ghosts there, of course; not fresh ones, but
I don't like no kind.
So then we come out and got some little donkeys and rode a piece, and
then went in a boat another piece, and then more donkeys, and got to
Cairo; and all the way the road was as smooth and beautiful a road as ever
I see, and had tall date-pa'ms on both sides, and naked children
everywhere, and the men was as red as copper, and fine and strong and
handsome. And the city was a curiosity. Such narrow streets-why, they were
just lanes, and crowded with people with turbans, and women with veils,
and everybody rigged out in blazing bright clothes and all sorts of
colors, and you wondered how the camels and the people got by each other
in such narrow little cracks, but they done it-a perfect jam, you see, and
everybody noisy. The stores warn't big enough to turn around in, but you
didn't have to go in; the storekeeper sat tailor fashion on his counter,
smoking his snaky long pipe, and had his things where he could reach them
to sell, and he was just as good as in the street, for the camel-loads
brushed him as they went by.
Now and then a grand person flew by in a carriage with fancy dressed
men running and yelling in front of it and whacking anybody with a long
rod that didn't get out of the way. And by and by along comes the Sultan
riding horseback at the head of a procession, and fairly took your breath
away his clothes was so splendid; and everybody fell flat and laid on his
stomach while he went by. I forgot, but a feller helped me to remember. He
was one that had a rod and run in front.
There was churches, but they don't know enough to keep Sunday; they
keep Friday and break the Sabbath. You have to take off your shoes when
you go in. There was crowds of men and boys in the church, setting in
groups on the stone floor and making no end of noise-getting their lessons
by heart, Tom said, out of the Koran, which they think is a Bible, and
people that knows better knows enough to not let on. I never see such a
big church in my life before, and most awful high, it was; it made you
dizzy to look up; our village church at home ain't a circumstance to it;
if you was to put it in there, people would think it was a drygoods box.
What I wanted to see was a dervish, because I was interested in
dervishes on accounts of the one that played the trick on the
camel-driver. So we found a lot in a kind of a church, and they called
themselves Whirling Dervishes; and they did whirl, too. I never see
anything like it. They had tall sugar-loaf hats on, and linen petticoats;
and they spun and spun and spun, round and round like tops, and the
petticoats stood out on a slant, and it was the prettiest thing I ever
see, and made me drunk to look at it. They was all Moslems, Tom said, and
when I asked him what a Moslem was, he said it was a person that wasn't a
Presbyterian. So there is plenty of them in Missouri, though I didn't know
it before.
We didn't see half there was to see in Cairo, because Tom was in such a
sweat to hunt out places that was celebrated in history. We had a most
tiresome time to find the granary where Joseph stored up the grain before
the famine, and when we found it it warn't worth much to look at, being
such an old tumble-down wreck; but Tom was satisfied, and made more fuss
over it than I would make if I stuck a nail in my foot. How he ever found
that place was too many for me. We passed as much as forty just like it
before we come to it, and any of them would 'a' done for me, but none but
just the right one would suit him; I never see anybody so particular as
Tom Sawyer. The minute he struck the right one he reconnized it as easy as
I would reconnize my other shirt if I had one, but how he done it he
couldn't any more tell than he could fly; he said so himself.
Then we hunted a long time for the house where the boy lived that
learned the cadi how to try the case of the old olives and the new ones,
and said it was out of the Arabian Nights, and he would tell me and Jim
about it when he got time. Well, we hunted and hunted till I was ready to
drop, and I wanted Tom to give it up and come next day and git somebody
that knowed the town and could talk Missourian and could go straight to
the place; but no, he wanted to find it himself, and nothing else would
answer. So on we went. Then at last the remarkablest thing happened I ever
see. The house was gone-gone hundreds of years ago-every last rag of it
gone but just one mud brick. Now a person wouldn't ever believe that a
backwoods Missouri boy that hadn't ever been in that town before could go
and hunt that place over and find that brick, but Tom Sawyer done it. I
know he done it, because I see him do it. I was right by his very side at
the time, and see him see the brick and see him reconnize it. Well, I says
to myself, how DOES he do it? Is it knowledge, or is it instink?
Now there's the facts, just as they happened: let everybody explain it
their own way. I've ciphered over it a good deal, and it's my opinion that
some of it is knowledge but the main bulk of it is instink. The reason is
this: Tom put the brick in his pocket to give to a museum with his name on
it and the facts when he went home, and I slipped it out and put another
brick considerable like it in its place, and he didn't know the
difference-but there was a difference, you see. I think that settles
it-it's mostly instink, not knowledge. Instink tells him where the exact
PLACE is for the brick to be in, and so he reconnizes it by the place it's
in, not by the look of the brick. If it was knowledge, not instink, he
would know the brick again by the look of it the next time he seen
it-which he didn't. So it shows that for all the brag you hear about
knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth forty of it for
real unerringness. Jim says the same.
When we got back Jim dropped down and took us in, and there was a young
man there with a red skullcap and tassel on and a beautiful silk jacket
and baggy trousers with a shawl around his waist and pistols in it that
could talk English and wanted to hire to us as guide and take us to Mecca
and Medina and Central Africa and everywheres for a half a dollar a day
and his keep, and we hired him and left, and piled on the power, and by
the time we was through dinner we was over the place where the Israelites
crossed the Red Sea when Pharaoh tried to overtake them and was caught by
the waters. We stopped, then, and had a good look at the place, and it
done Jim good to see it. He said he could see it all, now, just the way it
happened; he could see the Israelites walking along between the walls of
water, and the Egyptians coming, from away off yonder, hurrying all they
could, and see them start in as the Israelites went out, and then when
they was all in, see the walls tumble together and drown the last man of
them. Then we piled on the power again and rushed away and huvvered over
Mount Sinai, and saw the place where Moses broke the tables of stone, and
where the children of Israel camped in the plain and worshiped the golden
calf, and it was all just as interesting as could be, and the guide knowed
every place as well as I knowed the village at home.
But we had an accident, now, and it fetched all the plans to a
standstill. Tom's old ornery corn-cob pipe had got so old and swelled and
warped that she couldn't hold together any longer, notwithstanding the
strings and bandages, but caved in and went to pieces. Tom he didn't know
WHAT to do. The professor's pipe wouldn't answer; it warn't anything but a
mershum, and a person that's got used to a cob pipe knows it lays a long
ways over all the other pipes in this world, and you can't git him to
smoke any other. He wouldn't take mine, I couldn't persuade him. So there
he was.
He thought it over, and said we must scour around and see if we could
roust out one in Egypt or Arabia or around in some of these countries, but
the guide said no, it warn't no use, they didn't have them. So Tom was
pretty glum for a little while, then he chirked up and said he'd got the
idea and knowed what to do. He says:
"I've got another corn-cob pipe, and it's a prime one, too, and nearly
new. It's laying on the rafter that's right over the kitchen stove at home
in the village. Jim, you and the guide will go and get it, and me and Huck
will camp here on Mount Sinai till you come back."
"But, Mars Tom, we couldn't ever find de village. I could find de pipe,
'case I knows de kitchen, but my lan', we can't ever find de village, nur
Sent Louis, nur none o' dem places. We don't know de way, Mars Tom."
That was a fact, and it stumped Tom for a minute. Then he said:
"Looky here, it can be done, sure; and I'll tell you how. You set your
compass and sail west as straight as a dart, till you find the United
States. It ain't any trouble, because it's the first land you'll strike
the other side of the Atlantic. If it's daytime when you strike it, bulge
right on, straight west from the upper part of the Florida coast, and in
an hour and three quarters you'll hit the mouth of the Mississippi-at the
speed that I'm going to send you. You'll be so high up in the air that the
earth will be curved considerable-sorter like a washbowl turned upside
down-and you'll see a raft of rivers crawling around every which way, long
before you get there, and you can pick out the Mississippi without any
trouble. Then you can follow the river north nearly, an hour and three
quarters, till you see the Ohio come in; then you want to look sharp,
because you're getting near. Away up to your left you'll see another
thread coming in-that's the Missouri and is a little above St. Louis.
You'll come down low then, so as you can examine the villages as you spin
along. You'll pass about twenty-five in the next fifteen minutes, and
you'll recognize ours when you see it-and if you don't, you can yell down
and ask."
"Ef it's dat easy, Mars Tom, I reckon we kin do it-yassir, I knows we
kin."
The guide was sure of it, too, and thought that he could learn to stand
his watch in a little while.
"Jim can learn you the whole thing in a half an hour," Tom said. "This
balloon's as easy to manage as a canoe."
Tom got out the chart and marked out the course and measured it, and
says:
"To go back west is the shortest way, you see. It's only about seven
thousand miles. If you went east, and so on around, it's over twice as
far." Then he says to the guide, "I want you both to watch the tell-tale
all through the watches, and whenever it don't mark three hundred miles an
hour, you go higher or drop lower till you find a storm-current that's
going your way. There's a hundred miles an hour in this old thing without
any wind to help. There's twohundred-mile gales to be found, any time you
want to hunt for them."
"We'll hunt for them, sir."
"See that you do. Sometimes you may have to go up a couple of miles,
and it'll be p'ison cold, but most of the time you'll find your storm a
good deal lower. If you can only strike a cyclone-that's the ticket for
you! You'll see by the professor's books that they travel west in these
latitudes; and they travel low, too."
Then he ciphered on the time, and says-
"Seven thousand miles, three hundred miles an hour-you can make the
trip in a day-twenty-four hours. This is Thursday; you'll be back here
Saturday afternoon. Come, now, hustle out some blankets and food and books
and things for me and Huck, and you can start right along. There ain't no
occasion to fool around-I want a smoke, and the quicker you fetch that
pipe the better."
All hands jumped for the things, and in eight minutes our things was
out and the balloon was ready for America. So we shook hands good-bye, and
Tom gave his last orders:
"It's 1O minutes to 2 P.M. now, Mount Sinai time. In 24 hours you'll be
home, and it'll be 6 to-morrow morning, village time. When you strike the
village, land a little back of the top of the hill, in the woods, out of
sight; then you rush down, Jim, and shove these letters in the
post-office, and if you see anybody stirring, pull your slouch down over
your face so they won't know you. Then you go and slip in the back way to
the kitchen and git the pipe, and lay this piece of paper on the kitchen
table, and put something on it to hold it, and then slide out and git
away, and don't let Aunt Polly catch a sight of you, nor nobody else. Then
you jump for the balloon and shove for Mount Sinai three hundred miles an
hour. You won't have lost more than an hour. You'll start back at 7 or 8
A.M., village time, and be here in 24 hours, arriving at 2 or 3 P.M.,
Mount Sinai time."
Tom he read the piece of paper to us. He had wrote on it:
"THURSDAY AFTERNOON. Tom Sawyer the Erronort sends his love to Aunt
Polly from Mount Sinai where the Ark was, and so does Huck Finn, and she
will get it to-morrow morning half-past six." *
[This misplacing of the Ark is probably Huck's error, not Tom's.-M.T.]
"That'll make her eyes bulge out and the tears come," he says. Then he
says:
"Stand by! One-two-three-away you go!"
And away she DID go! Why, she seemed to whiz out of sight in a second.
Then we found a most comfortable cave that looked out over the whole
big plain, and there we camped to wait for the pipe.
The balloon come hack all right, and brung the pipe; but Aunt Polly had
catched Jim when he was getting it, and anybody can guess what happened:
she sent for Tom. So Jim he says:
"Mars Tom, she's out on de porch wid her eye sot on de sky a-layin' for
you, en she say she ain't gwyne to budge from dah tell she gits hold of
you. Dey's gwyne to be trouble, Mars Tom, 'deed dey is."
So then we shoved for home, and not feeling very gay, neither.
"Well, ef dat ain't makin' money de easiest ever I struck! She jes'
rained in-never cos' us a lick o' work. Le's mosey right along, Mars Tom."
But Tom was thinking and ciphering away so busy and excited he never
heard him. Pretty soon he says:
"Five dollars-sho! Look here, this sand's worth-worth-why, it's worth
no end of money."
"How is dat, Mars Tom? Go on, honey, go on!"
"Well, the minute people knows it's genuwyne sand from the genuwyne
Desert of Sahara, they'll just be in a perfect state of mind to git hold
of some of it to keep on the what-not in a vial with a label on it for a
curiosity. All we got to do is to put it up in vials and float around all
over the United States and peddle them out at ten cents apiece. We've got
all of ten thousand dollars' worth of sand in this boat."
Me and Jim went all to pieces with joy, and begun to shout
whoopjamboreehoo, and Tom says:
"And we can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and
fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we've carted this whole
Desert over there and sold it out; and there ain't ever going to be any
opposition, either, because we'll take out a patent."
"My goodness," I says, "we'll be as rich as Creosote, won't we, Tom?"
"Yes-Creesus, you mean. Why, that dervish was hunting in that little
hill for the treasures of the earth, and didn't know he was walking over
the real ones for a thousand miles. He was blinder than he made the
driver."
"Mars Tom, how much is we gwyne to be worth?"
"Well, I don't know yet. It's got to be ciphered, and it ain't the
easiest job to do, either, because it's over four million square miles of
sand at ten cents a vial."
Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out considerable, and he shook
his head and says:
"Mars Tom, we can't 'ford all dem vials-a king couldn't. We better not
try to take de whole Desert, Mars Tom, de vials gwyne to bust us, sho'."
Tom's excitement died out, too, now, and I reckoned it was on account
of the vials, but it wasn't. He set there thinking, and got bluer and
bluer, and at last he says:
"Boys, it won't work; we got to give it up."
"Why, Tom?"
"On account of the duties."
I couldn't make nothing out of that, neither could Jim. I says:
"What IS our duty, Tom? Because if we can't git around it, why can't we
just DO it? People often has to."
But he says:
"Oh, it ain't that kind of duty. The kind I mean is a tax. Whenever you
strike a frontier-that's the border of a country, you know-you find a
customhouse there, and the gov'ment officers comes and rummages among your
things and charges a big tax, which they call a duty because it's their
duty to bust you if they can, and if you don't pay the duty they'll hog
your sand. They call it confiscating, but that don't deceive nobody, it's
just hogging, and that's all it is. Now if we try to carry this sand home
the way we're pointed now, we got to climb fences till we git tired-just
frontier after frontier-Egypt, Arabia, Hindostan, and so on, and they'll
all whack on a duty, and so you see, easy enough, we CAN'T go THAT road."
"Why, Tom," I says, "we can sail right over their old frontiers; how
are THEY going to stop us?"
He looked sorrowful at me, and says, very grave:
"Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest?"
I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said nothing, and he went on:
"Well, we're shut off the other way, too. If we go back the way we've
come, there's the New York custom-house, and that is worse than all of
them others put together, on account of the kind of cargo we've got."
"Why?"
"Well, they can't raise Sahara sand in America, of course, and when
they can't raise a thing there, the duty is fourteen hundred thousand per
cent. on it if you try to fetch it in from where they do raise it."
"There ain't no sense in that, Tom Sawyer."
"Who said there WAS? What do you talk to me like that for, Huck Finn?
You wait till I say a thing's got sense in it before you go to accusing me
of saying it."
"All right, consider me crying about it, and sorry. Go on."
Jim says:
"Mars Tom, do dey jam dat duty onto everything we can't raise in
America, en don't make no 'stinction 'twix' anything?"
"Yes, that's what they do."
"Mars Tom, ain't de blessin' o' de Lord de mos' valuable thing dey is?"
"Yes, it is."
"Don't de preacher stan' up in de pulpit en call it down on de people?"
"Yes."
"Whah do it come from?"
"From heaven."
"Yassir! you's jes' right, 'deed you is, honey-it come from heaven, en
dat's a foreign country. NOW, den! do dey put a tax on dat blessin'?"
"No, they don't."
"Course dey don't; en so it stan' to reason dat you's mistaken, Mars
Tom. Dey wouldn't put de tax on po' truck like san', dat everybody ain't
'bleeged to have, en leave it off'n de bes' thing dey is, which nobody
can't git along widout."
Tom Sawyer was stumped; he see Jim had got him where he couldn't budge.
He tried to wiggle out by saying they had FORGOT to put on that tax, but
they'd be sure to remember about it, next session of Congress, and then
they'd put it on, but that was a poor lame come-off, and he knowed it. He
said there warn't nothing foreign that warn't taxed but just that one, and
so they couldn't be consistent without taxing it, and to be consistent was
the first law of politics. So he stuck to it that they'd left it out
unintentional and would be certain to do their best to fix it before they
got caught and laughed at.
But I didn't feel no more interest in such things, as long as we
couldn't git our sand through, and it made me low-spirited, and Jim the
same. Tom he tried to cheer us up by saying he would think up another
speculation for us that would be just as good as this one and better, but
it didn't do no good, we didn't believe there was any as big as this. It
was mighty hard; such a little while ago we was so rich, and could 'a'
bought a country and started a kingdom and been celebrated and happy, and
now we was so poor and ornery again, and had our sand left on our hands.
The sand was looking so lovely before, just like gold and di'monds, and
the feel of it was so soft and so silky and nice, but now I couldn't bear
the sight of it, it made me sick to look at it, and I knowed I wouldn't
ever feel comfortable again till we got shut of it, and I didn't have it
there no more to remind us of what we had been and what we had got
degraded down to. The others was feeling the same way about it that I was.
I knowed it, because they cheered up so, the minute I says le's throw this
truck overboard.
Well, it was going to be work, you know, and pretty solid work, too; so
Tom he divided it up according to fairness and strength. He said me and
him would clear out a fifth apiece of the sand, and Jim threefifths. Jim
he didn't quite like that arrangement. He says:
"Course I's de stronges', en I's willin' to do a share accordin', but
by jings you's kinder pilin' it onto ole Jim, Mars Tom, hain't you?"
"Well, I didn't think so, Jim, but you try your hand at fixing it, and
let's see."
So Jim reckoned it wouldn't be no more than fair if me and Tom done a
TENTH apiece. Tom he turned his back to git room and be private, and then
he smole a smile that spread around and covered the whole Sahara to the
westward, back to the Atlantic edge of it where we come from. Then he
turned around again and said it was a good enough arrangement, and we was
satisfied if Jim was. Jim said he was.
So then Tom measured off our two-tenths in the bow and left the rest
for Jim, and it surprised Jim a good deal to see how much difference there
was and what a raging lot of sand his share come to, and said he was
powerful glad now that he had spoke up in time and got the first
arrangement altered, for he said that even the way it was now, there was
more sand than enjoyment in his end of the contract, he believed.
Then we laid into it. It was mighty hot work, and tough; so hot we had
to move up into cooler weather or we couldn't 'a' stood it. Me and Tom
took turn about, and one worked while t'other rested, but there warn't
nobody to spell poor old Jim, and he made all that part of Africa damp, he
sweated so. We couldn't work good, we was so full of laugh, and Jim he
kept fretting and wanting to know what tickled us so, and we had to keep
making up things to account for it, and they was pretty poor inventions,
but they done well enough, Jim didn't see through them. At last when we
got done we was 'most dead, but not with work but with laughing. By and by
Jim was 'most dead, too, but: it was with work; then we took turns and
spelled him, and he was as thankfull as he could be, and would set on the
gunnel and swab the sweat, and heave and pant, and say how good we was to
a poor old nigger, and he wouldn't ever forgit us. He was always the
gratefulest nigger I ever see, for any little thing you done for him. He
was only nigger outside; inside he was as white as you be.
THE next few meals was pretty sandy, but that don't make no difference
when you are hungry; and when you ain't it ain't no satisfaction to eat,
anyway, and so a little grit in the meat ain't no particular drawback, as
far as I can see.
Then we struck the east end of the Desert at last, sailing on a
northeast course. Away off on the edge of the sand, in a soft pinky light,
we see three little sharp roofs like tents, and Tom says:
"It's the pyramids of Egypt."
It made my heart fairly jump. You see, I had seen a many and a many a
picture of them, and heard tell about them a hundred times, and yet to
come on them all of a sudden, that way, and find they was REAL, 'stead of
imaginations, 'most knocked the breath out of me with surprise. It's a
curious thing, that the more you hear about a grand and big and bully
thing or person, the more it kind of dreamies out, as you may say, and
gets to be a big dim wavery figger made out of moonshine and nothing solid
to it. It's just so with George Washington, and the same with them
pyramids.
And moreover, besides, the thing they always said about them seemed to
me to be stretchers. There was a feller come to the Sunday-school once,
and had a picture of them, and made a speech, and said the biggest pyramid
covered thirteen acres, and was most five hundred foot high, just a steep
mountain, all built out of hunks of stone as big as a bureau, and laid up
in perfectly regular layers, like stair-steps. Thirteen acres, you see,
for just one building; it's a farm. If it hadn't been in Sunday-school, I
would 'a' judged it was a lie; and outside I was certain of it. And he
said there was a hole in the pyramid, and you could go in there with
candles, and go ever so far up a long slanting tunnel, and come to a large
room in the stomach of that stone mountain, and there you would find a big
stone chest with a king in it, four thousand years old. I said to myself,
then, if that ain't a lie I will eat that king if they will fetch him, for
even Methusalem warn't that old, and nobody claims it.
As we come a little nearer we see the yaller sand come to an end in a
long straight edge like a blanket, and on to it was joined, edge to edge,
a wide country of bright green, with a snaky stripe crooking through it,
and Tom said it was the Nile. It made my heart jump again, for the Nile
was another thing that wasn't real to me. Now I can tell you one thing
which is dead certain: if you will fool along over three thousand miles of
yaller sand, all glimmering with heat so that it makes your eyes water to
look at it, and you've been a considerable part of a week doing it, the
green country will look so like home and heaven to you that it will make
your eyes water AGAIN.
It was just so with me, and the same with Jim.
And when Jim got so he could believe it WAS the land of Egypt he was
looking at, he wouldn't enter it standing up, but got down on his knees
and took off his hat, because he said it wasn't fitten' for a humble poor
nigger to come any other way where such men had been as Moses and Joseph
and Pharaoh and the other prophets. He was a Presbyterian, and had a most
deep respect for Moses which was a Presbyterian, too, he said. He was all
stirred up, and says:
"Hit's de lan' of Egypt, de lan' of Egypt, en I's 'lowed to look at it
wid my own eyes! En dah's de river dat was turn' to blood, en I's looking
at de very same groun' whah de plagues was, en de lice, en de frogs, en de
locus', en de hail, en whah dey marked de door-pos', en de angel o' de
Lord come by in de darkness o' de night en slew de fust-born in all de
lan' o' Egypt. Ole Jim ain't worthy to see dis day!"
And then he just broke down and cried, he was so thankful. So between
him and Tom there was talk enough, Jim being excited because the land was
so full of history-Joseph and his brethren, Moses in the bulrushers, Jacob
coming down into Egypt to buy corn, the silver cup in the sack, and all
them interesting things; and Tom just as excited too, because the land was
so full of history that was in HIS line, about Noureddin, and Bedreddin,
and such like monstrous giants, that made Jim's wool rise, and a raft of
other Arabian Nights folks, which the half of them never done the things
they let on they done, I don't believe.
Then we struck a disappointment, for one of them early morning fogs
started up, and it warn't no use to sail over the top of it, because we
would go by Egypt, sure, so we judged it was best to set her by compass
straight for the place where the pyramids was gitting blurred and blotted
out, and then drop low and skin along pretty close to the ground and keep
a sharp lookout. Tom took the hellum, I stood by to let go the anchor, and
Jim he straddled the bow to dig through the fog with his eyes and watch
out for danger ahead. We went along a steady gait, but not very fast, and
the fog got solider and solider, so solid that Jim looked dim and ragged
and smoky through it. It was awful still, and we talked low and was
anxious. Now and then Jim would say:
"Highst her a p'int, Mars Tom, highst her!" and up she would skip, a
foot or two, and we would slide right over a flat-roofed mud cabin, with
people that had been asleep on it just beginning to turn out and gap and
stretch; and once when a feller was clear up on his hind legs so he could
gap and stretch better, we took him a blip in the back and knocked him
off. By and by, after about an hour, and everything dead still and we
a-straining our ears for sounds and holding our breath, the fog thinned a
little, very sudden, and Jim sung out in an awful scare:
"Oh, for de lan's sake, set her back, Mars Tom, here's de biggest giant
outen de 'Rabian Nights acomin' for us!" and he went over backwards in the
boat.
Tom slammed on the back-action, and as we slowed to a standstill a
man's face as big as our house at home looked in over the gunnel, same as
a house looks out of its windows, and I laid down and died. I must 'a'
been clear dead and gone for as much as a minute or more; then I come to,
and Tom had hitched a boathook on to the lower lip of the giant and was
holding the balloon steady with it whilst he canted his head back and got
a good long look up at that awful face.
Jim was on his knees with his hands clasped, gazing up at the thing in
a begging way, and working his lips, but not getting anything out. I took
only just a glimpse, and was fading out again, but Tom says:
"He ain't alive, you fools; it's the Sphinx!"
I never see Tom look so little and like a fly; but that was because the
giant's head was so big and awful. Awful, yes, so it was, but not dreadful
any more, because you could see it was a noble face, and kind of sad, and
not thinking about you, but about other things and larger. It was stone,
reddish stone, and its nose and ears battered, and that give it an abused
look, and you felt sorrier for it for that.
We stood off a piece, and sailed around it and over it, and it was just
grand. It was a man's head, or maybe a woman's, on a tiger's body a
hundred and twenty-five foot long, and there was a dear little temple
between its front paws. All but the head used to be under the sand, for
hundreds of years, maybe thousands, but they had just lately dug the sand
away and found that little temple. It took a power of sand to bury that
cretur; most as much as it would to bury a steamboat, I reckon.
We landed Jim on top of the head, with an American flag to protect him,
it being a foreign land; then we sailed off to this and that and t'other
distance, to git what Tom called effects and perspectives and proportions,
and Jim he done the best he could, striking all the different kinds of
attitudes and positions he could study up, but standing on his head and
working his legs the way a frog does was the best. The further we got
away, the littler Jim got, and the grander the Sphinx got, till at last it
was only a clothespin on a dome, as you might say. That's the way
perspective brings out the correct proportions, Tom said; he said Julus
Cesar's niggers didn't know how big he was, they was too close to him.
Then we sailed off further and further, till we couldn't see Jim at all
any more, and then that great figger was at its noblest, a-gazing out over
the Nile Valley so still and solemn and lonesome, and all the little
shabby huts and things that was scattered about it clean disappeared and
gone, and nothing around it now but a soft wide spread of yaller velvet,
which was the sand.
That was the right place to stop, and we done it. We set there
a-looking and a-thinking for a half an hour, nobody a-saying anything, for
it made us feel quiet and kind of solemn to remember it had been looking
over that valley just that same way, and thinking its awful thoughts all
to itself for thousands of years. and nobody can't find out what they are
to this day.
At last I took up the glass and see some little black things a-capering
around on that velvet carpet, and some more a-climbing up the cretur's
back, and then I see two or three wee puffs of white smoke, and told Tom
to look. He done it, and says:
"They're bugs. No-hold on; they-why, I believe they're men. Yes, it's
men-men and horses both. They're hauling a long ladder up onto the
Sphinx's back-now ain't that odd? And now they're trying to lean it up
a-there's some more puffs of smoke-it's guns! Huck, they're after Jim."
We clapped on the power, and went for them abiling. We was there in no
time, and come a-whizzing down amongst them, and they broke and scattered
every which way, and some that was climbing the ladder after Jim let go
all holts and fell. We soared up and found him laying on top of the head
panting and most tuckered out, partly from howling for help and partly
from scare. He had been standing a siege a long time-a week, HE said, but
it warn't so, it only just seemed so to him because they was crowding him
so. They had shot at him, and rained the bullets all around him, but he
warn't hit, and when they found he wouldn't stand up and the bullets
couldn't git at him when he was laying down, they went for the ladder, and
then he knowed it was all up with him if we didn't come pretty quick. Tom
was very indignant, and asked him why he didn't show the flag and command
them to GIT, in the name of the United States. Jim said he done it, but
they never paid no attention. Tom said he would have this thing looked
into at Washington, and says:
"You'll see that they'll have to apologize for insulting the flag, and
pay an indemnity, too, on top of it even if they git off THAT easy."
Jim says:
"What's an indemnity, Mars Tom?"
"It's cash, that's what it is."
"Who gits it, Mars Tom?"
"Why, WE do."
"En who gits de apology?"
"The United States. Or, we can take whichever we please. We can take
the apology, if we want to, and let the gov'ment take the money."
"How much money will it be, Mars Tom?"
"Well, in an aggravated case like this one, it will be at least three
dollars apiece, and I don't know but more."
"Well, den, we'll take de money, Mars Tom, blame de 'pology. Hain't dat
yo' notion, too? En hain't it yourn, Huck?"
We talked it over a little and allowed that that was as good a way as
any, so we agreed to take the money. It was a new business to me, and I
asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he
says:
"Yes; the little ones does."
We was sailing around examining the pyramids, you know, and now we
soared up and roosted on the flat top of the biggest one, and found it was
just like what the man said in the Sunday-school. It was like four pairs
of stairs that starts broad at the bottom and slants up and comes together
in a point at the top, only these stair-steps couldn't be clumb the way
you climb other stairs; no, for each step was as high as your chin, and
you have to be boosted up from behind. The two other pyramids warn't far
away, and the people moving about on the sand between looked like bugs
crawling, we was so high above them.
Tom he couldn't hold himself he was so worked up with gladness and
astonishment to be in such a celebrated place, and he just dripped history
from every pore, seemed to me. He said he couldn't scarcely believe he was
standing on the very identical spot the prince flew from on the Bronze
Horse. It was in the Arabian Night times, he said. Somebody give the
prince a bronze horse with a peg in its shoulder, and he could git on him
and fly through the air like a bird, and go all over the world, and steer
it by turning the peg, and fly high or low and land wherever he wanted to.
When he got done telling it there was one of them uncomfortable
silences that comes, you know, when a person has been telling a whopper
and you feel sorry for him and wish you could think of some way to change
the subject and let him down easy, but git stuck and don't see no way, and
before you can pull your mind together and DO something, that silence has
got in and spread itself and done the business. I was embarrassed, Jim he
was embarrassed, and neither of us couldn't say a word. Well, Tom he
glowered at me a minute, and says:
"Come, out with it. What do you think?"
I says:
"Tom Sawyer, YOU don't believe that, yourself."
"What's the reason I don't? What's to hender me?"
"There's one thing to hender you: it couldn't happen, that's all."
"What's the reason it couldn't happen?"
"You tell me the reason it COULD happen."
"This balloon is a good enough reason it could happen, I should reckon."
"WHY is it?"
"WHY is it? I never saw such an idiot. Ain't this balloon and the
bronze horse the same thing under different names?"
"No, they're not. One is a balloon and the other's a horse. It's very
different. Next you'll be saying a house and a cow is the same thing."
"By Jackson, Huck's got him ag'in! Dey ain't no wigglin' outer dat!"
"Shut your head, Jim; you don't know what you're talking about. And
Huck don't. Look here, Huck, I'll make it plain to you, so you can
understand. You see, it ain't the mere FORM that's got anything to do with
their being similar or unsimilar, it's the PRINCIPLE involved; and the
principle is the same in both. Don't you see, now?"
I turned it over in my mind, and says:
"Tom, it ain't no use. Principles is all very well, but they don't git
around that one big fact, that the thing that a balloon can do ain't no
sort of proof of what a horse can do."
"Shucks, Huck, you don't get the idea at all. Now look here a
minute-it's perfectly plain. Don't we fly through the air?"
"Yes."
"Very well. Don't we fly high or fly low, just as we please?"
"Yes."
"Don't we steer whichever way we want to?"
"Yes."
"And don't we land when and where we please?"
"Yes."
"How do we move the balloon and steer it?"
"By touching the buttons."
"NOW I reckon the thing is clear to you at last. In the other case the
moving and steering was done by turning a peg. We touch a button, the
prince turned a peg. There ain't an atom of difference, you see. I knowed
I could git it through your head if I stuck to it long enough."
He felt so happy he begun to whistle. But me and Jim was silent, so he
broke off surprised, and says:
"Looky here, Huck Finn, don't you see it YET?"
I says:
"Tom Sawyer, I want to ask you some questions."
"Go ahead," he says, and I see Jim chirk up to listen.
"As I understand it, the whole thing is in the buttons and the peg-the
rest ain't of no consequence. A button is one shape, a peg is another
shape, but that ain't any matter?"
"No, that ain't any matter, as long as they've both got the same power."
"All right, then. What is the power that's in a candle and in a match?"
"It's the fire."
"It's the same in both, then?"
"Yes, just the same in both."
"All right. Suppose I set fire to a carpenter shop with a match, what
will happen to that carpenter shop?"
"She'll burn up."
"And suppose I set fire to this pyramid with a candle-will she burn up?"
"Of course she won't."
"All right. Now the fire's the same, both times. WHY does the shop
burn, and the pyramid don't?"
"Because the pyramid CAN'T burn."
"Aha! and A HORSE CAN'T FLY!"
"My lan', ef Huck ain't got him ag'in! Huck's landed him high en dry
dis time, I tell you! Hit's de smartes' trap I ever see a body walk
inter-en ef I-"
But Jim was so full of laugh he got to strangling and couldn't go on,
and Tom was that mad to see how neat I had floored him, and turned his own
argument ag'in him and knocked him all to rags and flinders with it, that
all he could manage to say was that whenever he heard me and Jim try to
argue it made him ashamed of the human race. I never said nothing; I was
feeling pretty well satisfied. When I have got the best of a person that
way, it ain't my way to go around crowing about it the way some people
does, for I consider that if I was in his place I wouldn't wish him to
crow over me. It's better to be generous, that's what I think.
BY AND BY we left Jim to float around up there in the neighborhood of
the pyramids, and we clumb down to the hole where you go into the tunnel,
and went in with some Arabs and candles, and away in there in the middle
of the pyramid we found a room and a big stone box in it where they used
to keep that king, just as the man in the Sunday-school said; but he was
gone, now; somebody had got him. But I didn't take no interest in the
place, because there could be ghosts there, of course; not fresh ones, but
I don't like no kind.
So then we come out and got some little donkeys and rode a piece, and
then went in a boat another piece, and then more donkeys, and got to
Cairo; and all the way the road was as smooth and beautiful a road as ever
I see, and had tall date-pa'ms on both sides, and naked children
everywhere, and the men was as red as copper, and fine and strong and
handsome. And the city was a curiosity. Such narrow streets-why, they were
just lanes, and crowded with people with turbans, and women with veils,
and everybody rigged out in blazing bright clothes and all sorts of
colors, and you wondered how the camels and the people got by each other
in such narrow little cracks, but they done it-a perfect jam, you see, and
everybody noisy. The stores warn't big enough to turn around in, but you
didn't have to go in; the storekeeper sat tailor fashion on his counter,
smoking his snaky long pipe, and had his things where he could reach them
to sell, and he was just as good as in the street, for the camel-loads
brushed him as they went by.
Now and then a grand person flew by in a carriage with fancy dressed
men running and yelling in front of it and whacking anybody with a long
rod that didn't get out of the way. And by and by along comes the Sultan
riding horseback at the head of a procession, and fairly took your breath
away his clothes was so splendid; and everybody fell flat and laid on his
stomach while he went by. I forgot, but a feller helped me to remember. He
was one that had a rod and run in front.
There was churches, but they don't know enough to keep Sunday; they
keep Friday and break the Sabbath. You have to take off your shoes when
you go in. There was crowds of men and boys in the church, setting in
groups on the stone floor and making no end of noise-getting their lessons
by heart, Tom said, out of the Koran, which they think is a Bible, and
people that knows better knows enough to not let on. I never see such a
big church in my life before, and most awful high, it was; it made you
dizzy to look up; our village church at home ain't a circumstance to it;
if you was to put it in there, people would think it was a drygoods box.
What I wanted to see was a dervish, because I was interested in
dervishes on accounts of the one that played the trick on the
camel-driver. So we found a lot in a kind of a church, and they called
themselves Whirling Dervishes; and they did whirl, too. I never see
anything like it. They had tall sugar-loaf hats on, and linen petticoats;
and they spun and spun and spun, round and round like tops, and the
petticoats stood out on a slant, and it was the prettiest thing I ever
see, and made me drunk to look at it. They was all Moslems, Tom said, and
when I asked him what a Moslem was, he said it was a person that wasn't a
Presbyterian. So there is plenty of them in Missouri, though I didn't know
it before.
We didn't see half there was to see in Cairo, because Tom was in such a
sweat to hunt out places that was celebrated in history. We had a most
tiresome time to find the granary where Joseph stored up the grain before
the famine, and when we found it it warn't worth much to look at, being
such an old tumble-down wreck; but Tom was satisfied, and made more fuss
over it than I would make if I stuck a nail in my foot. How he ever found
that place was too many for me. We passed as much as forty just like it
before we come to it, and any of them would 'a' done for me, but none but
just the right one would suit him; I never see anybody so particular as
Tom Sawyer. The minute he struck the right one he reconnized it as easy as
I would reconnize my other shirt if I had one, but how he done it he
couldn't any more tell than he could fly; he said so himself.
Then we hunted a long time for the house where the boy lived that
learned the cadi how to try the case of the old olives and the new ones,
and said it was out of the Arabian Nights, and he would tell me and Jim
about it when he got time. Well, we hunted and hunted till I was ready to
drop, and I wanted Tom to give it up and come next day and git somebody
that knowed the town and could talk Missourian and could go straight to
the place; but no, he wanted to find it himself, and nothing else would
answer. So on we went. Then at last the remarkablest thing happened I ever
see. The house was gone-gone hundreds of years ago-every last rag of it
gone but just one mud brick. Now a person wouldn't ever believe that a
backwoods Missouri boy that hadn't ever been in that town before could go
and hunt that place over and find that brick, but Tom Sawyer done it. I
know he done it, because I see him do it. I was right by his very side at
the time, and see him see the brick and see him reconnize it. Well, I says
to myself, how DOES he do it? Is it knowledge, or is it instink?
Now there's the facts, just as they happened: let everybody explain it
their own way. I've ciphered over it a good deal, and it's my opinion that
some of it is knowledge but the main bulk of it is instink. The reason is
this: Tom put the brick in his pocket to give to a museum with his name on
it and the facts when he went home, and I slipped it out and put another
brick considerable like it in its place, and he didn't know the
difference-but there was a difference, you see. I think that settles
it-it's mostly instink, not knowledge. Instink tells him where the exact
PLACE is for the brick to be in, and so he reconnizes it by the place it's
in, not by the look of the brick. If it was knowledge, not instink, he
would know the brick again by the look of it the next time he seen
it-which he didn't. So it shows that for all the brag you hear about
knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth forty of it for
real unerringness. Jim says the same.
When we got back Jim dropped down and took us in, and there was a young
man there with a red skullcap and tassel on and a beautiful silk jacket
and baggy trousers with a shawl around his waist and pistols in it that
could talk English and wanted to hire to us as guide and take us to Mecca
and Medina and Central Africa and everywheres for a half a dollar a day
and his keep, and we hired him and left, and piled on the power, and by
the time we was through dinner we was over the place where the Israelites
crossed the Red Sea when Pharaoh tried to overtake them and was caught by
the waters. We stopped, then, and had a good look at the place, and it
done Jim good to see it. He said he could see it all, now, just the way it
happened; he could see the Israelites walking along between the walls of
water, and the Egyptians coming, from away off yonder, hurrying all they
could, and see them start in as the Israelites went out, and then when
they was all in, see the walls tumble together and drown the last man of
them. Then we piled on the power again and rushed away and huvvered over
Mount Sinai, and saw the place where Moses broke the tables of stone, and
where the children of Israel camped in the plain and worshiped the golden
calf, and it was all just as interesting as could be, and the guide knowed
every place as well as I knowed the village at home.
But we had an accident, now, and it fetched all the plans to a
standstill. Tom's old ornery corn-cob pipe had got so old and swelled and
warped that she couldn't hold together any longer, notwithstanding the
strings and bandages, but caved in and went to pieces. Tom he didn't know
WHAT to do. The professor's pipe wouldn't answer; it warn't anything but a
mershum, and a person that's got used to a cob pipe knows it lays a long
ways over all the other pipes in this world, and you can't git him to
smoke any other. He wouldn't take mine, I couldn't persuade him. So there
he was.
He thought it over, and said we must scour around and see if we could
roust out one in Egypt or Arabia or around in some of these countries, but
the guide said no, it warn't no use, they didn't have them. So Tom was
pretty glum for a little while, then he chirked up and said he'd got the
idea and knowed what to do. He says:
"I've got another corn-cob pipe, and it's a prime one, too, and nearly
new. It's laying on the rafter that's right over the kitchen stove at home
in the village. Jim, you and the guide will go and get it, and me and Huck
will camp here on Mount Sinai till you come back."
"But, Mars Tom, we couldn't ever find de village. I could find de pipe,
'case I knows de kitchen, but my lan', we can't ever find de village, nur
Sent Louis, nur none o' dem places. We don't know de way, Mars Tom."
That was a fact, and it stumped Tom for a minute. Then he said:
"Looky here, it can be done, sure; and I'll tell you how. You set your
compass and sail west as straight as a dart, till you find the United
States. It ain't any trouble, because it's the first land you'll strike
the other side of the Atlantic. If it's daytime when you strike it, bulge
right on, straight west from the upper part of the Florida coast, and in
an hour and three quarters you'll hit the mouth of the Mississippi-at the
speed that I'm going to send you. You'll be so high up in the air that the
earth will be curved considerable-sorter like a washbowl turned upside
down-and you'll see a raft of rivers crawling around every which way, long
before you get there, and you can pick out the Mississippi without any
trouble. Then you can follow the river north nearly, an hour and three
quarters, till you see the Ohio come in; then you want to look sharp,
because you're getting near. Away up to your left you'll see another
thread coming in-that's the Missouri and is a little above St. Louis.
You'll come down low then, so as you can examine the villages as you spin
along. You'll pass about twenty-five in the next fifteen minutes, and
you'll recognize ours when you see it-and if you don't, you can yell down
and ask."
"Ef it's dat easy, Mars Tom, I reckon we kin do it-yassir, I knows we
kin."
The guide was sure of it, too, and thought that he could learn to stand
his watch in a little while.
"Jim can learn you the whole thing in a half an hour," Tom said. "This
balloon's as easy to manage as a canoe."
Tom got out the chart and marked out the course and measured it, and
says:
"To go back west is the shortest way, you see. It's only about seven
thousand miles. If you went east, and so on around, it's over twice as
far." Then he says to the guide, "I want you both to watch the tell-tale
all through the watches, and whenever it don't mark three hundred miles an
hour, you go higher or drop lower till you find a storm-current that's
going your way. There's a hundred miles an hour in this old thing without
any wind to help. There's twohundred-mile gales to be found, any time you
want to hunt for them."
"We'll hunt for them, sir."
"See that you do. Sometimes you may have to go up a couple of miles,
and it'll be p'ison cold, but most of the time you'll find your storm a
good deal lower. If you can only strike a cyclone-that's the ticket for
you! You'll see by the professor's books that they travel west in these
latitudes; and they travel low, too."
Then he ciphered on the time, and says-
"Seven thousand miles, three hundred miles an hour-you can make the
trip in a day-twenty-four hours. This is Thursday; you'll be back here
Saturday afternoon. Come, now, hustle out some blankets and food and books
and things for me and Huck, and you can start right along. There ain't no
occasion to fool around-I want a smoke, and the quicker you fetch that
pipe the better."
All hands jumped for the things, and in eight minutes our things was
out and the balloon was ready for America. So we shook hands good-bye, and
Tom gave his last orders:
"It's 1O minutes to 2 P.M. now, Mount Sinai time. In 24 hours you'll be
home, and it'll be 6 to-morrow morning, village time. When you strike the
village, land a little back of the top of the hill, in the woods, out of
sight; then you rush down, Jim, and shove these letters in the
post-office, and if you see anybody stirring, pull your slouch down over
your face so they won't know you. Then you go and slip in the back way to
the kitchen and git the pipe, and lay this piece of paper on the kitchen
table, and put something on it to hold it, and then slide out and git
away, and don't let Aunt Polly catch a sight of you, nor nobody else. Then
you jump for the balloon and shove for Mount Sinai three hundred miles an
hour. You won't have lost more than an hour. You'll start back at 7 or 8
A.M., village time, and be here in 24 hours, arriving at 2 or 3 P.M.,
Mount Sinai time."
Tom he read the piece of paper to us. He had wrote on it:
"THURSDAY AFTERNOON. Tom Sawyer the Erronort sends his love to Aunt
Polly from Mount Sinai where the Ark was, and so does Huck Finn, and she
will get it to-morrow morning half-past six." *
[This misplacing of the Ark is probably Huck's error, not Tom's.-M.T.]
"That'll make her eyes bulge out and the tears come," he says. Then he
says:
"Stand by! One-two-three-away you go!"
And away she DID go! Why, she seemed to whiz out of sight in a second.
Then we found a most comfortable cave that looked out over the whole
big plain, and there we camped to wait for the pipe.
The balloon come hack all right, and brung the pipe; but Aunt Polly had
catched Jim when he was getting it, and anybody can guess what happened:
she sent for Tom. So Jim he says:
"Mars Tom, she's out on de porch wid her eye sot on de sky a-layin' for
you, en she say she ain't gwyne to budge from dah tell she gits hold of
you. Dey's gwyne to be trouble, Mars Tom, 'deed dey is."
So then we shoved for home, and not feeling very gay, neither.