Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad.
Марк Твен. Том Сойер за границей. [Том Сойер - путешественник]
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Date: 18.09.2002
Chapter I. TOM SEEKS NEW ADVENTURES
DO you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? I
mean the adventures we had down the river, and the time we set the darky
Jim free and Tom got shot in the leg. No, he wasn't. It only just p'isoned
him for more. That was all the effect it had. You see, when we three came
back up the river in glory, as you may say, from that long travel, and the
village received us with a torchlight procession and speeches, and
everybody hurrah'd and shouted, it made us heroes, and that was what Tom
Sawyer had always been hankering to be.
For a while he WAS satisfied. Everybody made much of him, and he tilted
up his nose and stepped around the town as though he owned it. Some called
him Tom Sawyer the Traveler, and that just swelled him up fit to bust. You
see he laid over me and Jim considerable, because we only went down the
river on a raft and came back by the steamboat, but Tom went by the
steamboat both ways. The boys envied me and Jim a good deal, but land!
they just knuckled to the dirt before TOM.
Well, I don't know; maybe he might have been satisfied if it hadn't
been for old Nat Parsons, which was postmaster, and powerful long and
slim, and kind o' good-hearted and silly, and bald-headed, on account of
his age, and about the talkiest old cretur I ever see. For as much as
thirty years he'd been the only man in the village that had a reputation-I
mean a reputation for being a traveler, and of course he was mortal proud
of it, and it was reckoned that in the course of that thirty years he had
told about that journey over a million times and enjoyed it every time.
And now comes along a boy not quite fifteen, and sets everybody admiring
and gawking over HIS travels, and it just give the poor old man the high
strikes. It made him sick to listen to Tom, and to hear the people say "My
land!" "Did you ever!" "My goodness sakes alive!" and all such things; but
he couldn't pull away from it, any more than a fly that's got its hind leg
fast in the molasses. And always when Tom come to a rest, the poor old
cretur would chip in on HIS same old travels and work them for all they
were worth; but they were pretty faded, and didn't go for much, and it was
pitiful to see. And then Tom would take another innings, and then the old
man again-and so on, and so on, for an hour and more, each trying to beat
out the other.
You see, Parsons' travels happened like this: When he first got to be
postmaster and was green in the business, there come a letter for somebody
he didn't know, and there wasn't any such person in the village. Well, he
didn't know what to do, nor how to act, and there the letter stayed and
stayed, week in and week out, till the bare sight of it gave him a
conniption. The postage wasn't paid on it, and that was another thing to
worry about. There wasn't any way to collect that ten cents, and he
reckon'd the gov'ment would hold him responsible for it and maybe turn him
out besides, when they found he hadn't collected it. Well, at last he
couldn't stand it any longer. He couldn't sleep nights, he couldn't eat,
he was thinned down to a shadder, yet he da'sn't ask anybody's advice, for
the very person he asked for advice might go back on him and let the
gov'ment know about the letter. He had the letter buried under the floor,
but that did no good; if he happened to see a person standing over the
place it'd give him the cold shivers, and loaded him up with suspicions,
and he would sit up that night till the town was still and dark, and then
he would sneak there and get it out and bury it in another place. Of
course, people got to avoiding him and shaking their heads and whispering,
because, the way he was looking and acting, they judged he had killed
somebody or done something terrible, they didn't know what, and if he had
been a stranger they would've lynched him.
Well, as I was saying, it got so he couldn't stand it any longer; so he
made up his mind to pull out for Washington, and just go to the President
of the United States and make a clean breast of the whole thing, not
keeping back an atom, and then fetch the letter out and lay it before the
whole gov'ment, and say, "Now, there she is-do with me what you're a mind
to; though as heaven is my judge I am an innocent man and not deserving of
the full penalties of the law and leaving behind me a family that must
starve and yet hadn't had a thing to do with it, which is the whole truth
and I can swear to it."
So he did it. He had a little wee bit of steamboating, and some
stage-coaching, but all the rest of the way was horseback, and it took him
three weeks to get to Washington. He saw lots of land and lots of villages
and four cities. He was gone 'most eight weeks, and there never was such a
proud man in the village as he when he got back. His travels made him the
greatest man in all that region, and the most talked about; and people
come from as much as thirty miles back in the country, and from over in
the Illinois bottoms, too, just to look at him-and there they'd stand and
gawk, and he'd gabble. You never see anything like it.
Well, there wasn't any way now to settle which was the greatest
traveler; some said it was Nat, some said it was Tom. Everybody allowed
that Nat had seen the most longitude, but they had to give in that
whatever Tom was short in longitude he had made up in latitude and
climate. It was about a stand-off; so both of them had to whoop up their
dangerous adventures, and try to get ahead THAT way. That bullet-wound in
Tom's leg was a tough thing for Nat Parsons to buck against, but he bucked
the best he could; and at a disadvantage, too, for Tom didn't set still as
he'd orter done, to be fair, but always got up and sauntered around and
worked his limp while Nat was painting up the adventure that HE had in
Washington; for Tom never let go that limp when his leg got well, but
practiced it nights at home, and kept it good as new right along.
Nat's adventure was like this; I don't know how true it is; maybe he
got it out of a paper, or somewhere, but I will say this for him, that he
DID know how to tell it. He could make anybody's flesh crawl, and he'd
turn pale and hold his breath when he told it, and sometimes women and
girls got so faint they couldn't stick it out. Well, it was this way, as
near as I can remember:
He come a-loping into Washington, and put up his horse and shoved out
to the President's house with his letter, and they told him the President
was up to the Capitol, and just going to start for Philadelphia-not a
minute to lose if he wanted to catch him. Nat 'most dropped, it made him
so sick. His horse was put up, and he didn't know what to do. But just
then along comes a darky driving an old ramshackly hack, and he see his
chance. He rushes out and shouts: "A half a dollar if you git me to the
Capitol in half an hour, and a quarter extra if you do it in twenty
minutes!"
"Done!" says the darky.
Nat he jumped in and slammed the door, and away they went a-ripping and
a-tearing over the roughest road a body ever see, and the racket of it was
something awful. Nat passed his arms through the loops and hung on for
life and death, but pretty soon the hack hit a rock and flew up in the
air, and the bottom fell out, and when it come down Nat's feet was on the
ground, and he see he was in the most desperate danger if he couldn't keep
up with the hack. He was horrible scared, but he laid into his work for
all he was worth, and hung tight to the arm-loops and made his legs fairly
fly. He yelled and shouted to the driver to stop, and so did the crowds
along the street, for they could see his legs spinning along under the
coach, and his head and shoulders bobbing inside through the windows, and
he was in awful danger; but the more they all shouted the more the nigger
whooped and yelled and lashed the horses and shouted, "Don't you fret,
I'se gwine to git you dah in time, boss; I's gwine to do it, sho'!" for
you see he thought they were all hurrying him up, and, of course, he
couldn't hear anything for the racket he was making. And so they went
ripping along, and everybody just petrified to see it; and when they got
to the Capitol at last it was the quickest trip that ever was made, and
everybody said so. The horses laid down, and Nat dropped, all tuckered
out, and he was all dust and rags and barefooted; but he was in time and
just in time, and caught the President and give him the letter, and
everything was all right, and the President give him a free pardon on the
spot, and Nat give the nigger two extra quarters instead of one, because
he could see that if he hadn't had the hack he wouldn't'a' got there in
time, nor anywhere near it.
It WAS a powerful good adventure, and Tom Sawyer had to work his
bullet-wound mighty lively to hold his own against it.
Well, by and by Tom's glory got to paling down gradu'ly, on account of
other things turning up for the people to talk about-first a horse-race,
and on top of that a house afire, and on top of that the circus, and on
top of that the eclipse; and that started a revival, same as it always
does, and by that time there wasn't any more talk about Tom, so to speak,
and you never see a person so sick and disgusted.
Pretty soon he got to worrying and fretting right along day in and day
out, and when I asked him what WAS he in such a state about, he said it
'most broke his heart to think how time was slipping away, and him getting
older and older, and no wars breaking out and no way of making a name for
himself that he could see. Now that is the way boys is always thinking,
but he was the first one I ever heard come out and say it.
So then he set to work to get up a plan to make him celebrated; and
pretty soon he struck it, and offered to take me and Jim in. Tom Sawyer
was always free and generous that way. There's a-plenty of boys that's
mighty good and friendly when YOU'VE got a good thing, but when a good
thing happens to come their way they don't say a word to you, and try to
hog it all. That warn't ever Tom Sawyer's way, I can say that for him.
There's plenty of boys that will come hankering and groveling around you
when you've got an apple and beg the core off of you; but when they've got
one, and you beg for the core and remind them how you give them a core one
time, they say thank you 'most to death, but there ain't a-going to be no
core. But I notice they always git come up with; all you got to do is to
wait.
Well, we went out in the woods on the hill, and Tom told us what it
was. It was a crusade.
"What's a crusade?" I says.
He looked scornful, the way he's always done when he was ashamed of a
person, and says:
"Huck Finn, do you mean to tell me you don't know what a crusade is?"
"No," says I, "I don't. And I don't care to, nuther. I've lived till
now and done without it, and had my health, too. But as soon as you tell
me, I'll know, and that's soon enough. I don't see any use in finding out
things and clogging up my head with them when I mayn't ever have any
occasion to use 'em. There was Lance Williams, he learned how to talk
Choctaw here till one come and dug his grave for him. Now, then, what's a
crusade? But I can tell you one thing before you begin; if it's a
patent-right, there's no money in it. Bill Thompson he-"
"Patent-right!" says he. "I never see such an idiot. Why, a crusade is
a kind of war."
I thought he must be losing his mind. But no, he was in real earnest,
and went right on, perfectly ca'm.
"A crusade is a war to recover the Holy Land from the paynim."
"Which Holy Land?"
"Why, the Holy Land-there ain't but one."
"What do we want of it?"
"Why, can't you understand? It's in the hands of the paynim, and it's
our duty to take it away from them."
"How did we come to let them git hold of it?"
"We didn't come to let them git hold of it. They always had it."
"Why, Tom, then it must belong to them, don't it?"
"Why of course it does. Who said it didn't?"
I studied over it, but couldn't seem to git at the right of it, no way.
I says:
"It's too many for me, Tom Sawyer. If I had a farm and it was mine, and
another person wanted it, would it be right for him to-"
"Oh, shucks! you don't know enough to come in when it rains, Huck Finn.
It ain't a farm, it's entirely different. You see, it's like this. They
own the land, just the mere land, and that's all they DO own; but it was
our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven't
any business to be there defiling it. It's a shame, and we ought not to
stand it a minute. We ought to march against them and take it away from
them."
"Why, it does seem to me it's the most mixed-up thing I ever see! Now,
if I had a farm and another person-"
"Don't I tell you it hasn't got anything to do with farming? Farming is
business, just common low-down business: that's all it is, it's all you
can say for it; but this is higher, this is religious, and totally
different."
"Religious to go and take the land away from people that owns it?"
"Certainly; it's always been considered so."
Jim he shook his head, and says:
"Mars Tom, I reckon dey's a mistake about it somers-dey mos' sholy is.
I's religious myself, en I knows plenty religious people, but I hain't run
across none dat acts like dat."
It made Tom hot, and he says:
"Well, it's enough to make a body sick, such mullet-headed ignorance!
If either of you'd read anything about history, you'd know that Richard
Cur de Loon, and the Pope, and Godfrey de Bulleyn, and lots more of the
most noble-hearted and pious people in the world, hacked and hammered at
the paynims for more than two hundred years trying to take their land away
from them, and swum neck-deep in blood the whole time-and yet here's a
couple of sap-headed country yahoos out in the backwoods of Missouri
setting themselves up to know more about the rights and wrongs of it than
they did! Talk about cheek!"
Well, of course, that put a more different light on it, and me and Jim
felt pretty cheap and ignorant, and wished we hadn't been quite so
chipper. I couldn't say nothing, and Jim he couldn't for a while; then he
says:
"Well, den, I reckon it's all right; beca'se ef dey didn't know, dey
ain't no use for po' ignorant folks like us to be trying to know; en so,
ef it's our duty, we got to go en tackle it en do de bes' we can. Same
time, I feel as sorry for dem paynims as Mars Tom. De hard part gwine to
be to kill folks dat a body hain't been 'quainted wid and dat hain't done
him no harm. Dat's it, you see. Ef we wuz to go 'mongst 'em, jist we
three, en say we's hungry, en ast 'em for a bite to eat, why, maybe dey's
jist like yuther people. Don't you reckon dey is? Why, DEY'D give it, I
know dey would, en den-"
"Then what?"
"Well, Mars Tom, my idea is like dis. It ain't no use, we CAN'T kill
dem po' strangers dat ain't doin' us no harm, till we've had practice-I
knows it perfectly well, Mars Tom-'deed I knows it perfectly well. But ef
we takes a' axe or two, jist you en me en Huck, en slips acrost de river
to-night arter de moon's gone down, en kills dat sick fam'ly dat's over on
the Sny, en burns dey house down, en-"
"Oh, you make me tired!" says Tom. "I don't want to argue any more with
people like you and Huck Finn, that's always wandering from the subject,
and ain't got any more sense than to try to reason out a thing that's pure
theology by the laws that protect real estate!"
Now that's just where Tom Sawyer warn't fair. Jim didn't mean no harm,
and I didn't mean no harm. We knowed well enough that he was right and we
was wrong, and all we was after was to get at the HOW of it, and that was
all; and the only reason he couldn't explain it so we could understand it
was because we was ignorant-yes, and pretty dull, too, I ain't denying
that; but, land! that ain't no crime, I should think.
But he wouldn't hear no more about it-just said if we had tackled the
thing in the proper spirit, he would 'a' raised a couple of thousand
knights and put them in steel armor from head to heel, and made me a
lieutenant and Jim a sutler, and took the command himself and brushed the
whole paynim outfit into the sea like flies and come back across the world
in a glory like sunset. But he said we didn't know enough to take the
chance when we had it, and he wouldn't ever offer it again. And he didn't.
When he once got set, you couldn't budge him.
But I didn't care much. I am peaceable, and don't get up rows with
people that ain't doing nothing to me. I allowed if the paynim was
satisfied I was, and we would let it stand at that.
Now Tom he got all that notion out of Walter Scott's book, which he was
always reading. And it WAS a wild notion, because in my opinion he never
could've raised the men, and if he did, as like as not he would've got
licked. I took the book and read all about it, and as near as I could make
it out, most of the folks that shook farming to go crusading had a mighty
rocky time of it.
Chapter II. THE BALLOON ASCENSION
WELL, Tom got up one thing after another, but they all had tender spots
about 'em somewheres, and he had to shove 'em aside. So at last he was
about in despair. Then the St. Louis papers begun to talk a good deal
about the balloon that was going to sail to Europe, and Tom sort of
thought he wanted to go down and see what it looked like, but couldn't
make up his mind. But the papers went on talking, and so he allowed that
maybe if he didn't go he mightn't ever have another chance to see a
balloon; and next, he found out that Nat Parsons was going down to see it,
and that decided him, of course. He wasn't going to have Nat Parsons
coming back bragging about seeing the balloon, and him having to listen to
it and keep quiet. So he wanted me and Jim to go too, and we went.
It was a noble big balloon, and had wings and fans and all sorts of
things, and wasn't like any balloon you see in pictures. It was away out
toward the edge of town, in a vacant lot, corner of Twelfth street; and
there was a big crowd around it, making fun of it, and making fun of the
man,-a lean pale feller with that soft kind of moonlight in his eyes, you
know,-and they kept saying it wouldn't go. It made him hot to hear them,
and he would turn on them and shake his fist and say they was animals and
blind, but some day they would find they had stood face to face with one
of the men that lifts up nations and makes civilizations, and was too dull
to know it; and right here on this spot their own children and
grandchildren would build a monument to him that would outlast a thousand
years, but his name would outlast the monument. And then the crowd would
burst out in a laugh again, and yell at him, and ask him what was his name
before he was married, and what he would take to not do it, and what was
his sister's cat's grandmother's name, and all the things that a crowd
says when they've got hold of a feller that they see they can plague.
Well, some things they said WAS funny,-yes, and mighty witty too, I ain't
denying that,-but all the same it warn't fair nor brave, all them people
pitching on one, and they so glib and sharp, and him without any gift of
talk to answer back with. But, good land! what did he want to sass back
for? You see, it couldn't do him no good, and it was just nuts for them.
They HAD him, you know. But that was his way. I reckon he couldn't help
it; he was made so, I judge. He was a good enough sort of cretur, and
hadn't no harm in him, and was just a genius, as the papers said, which
wasn't his fault. We can't all be sound: we've got to be the way we're
made. As near as I can make out, geniuses think they know it all, and so
they won't take people's advice, but always go their own way, which makes
everybody forsake them and despise them, and that is perfectly natural. If
they was humbler, and listened and tried to learn, it would be better for
them.
The part the professor was in was like a boat, and was big and roomy,
and had water-tight lockers around the inside to keep all sorts of things
in, and a body could sit on them, and make beds on them, too. We went
aboard, and there was twenty people there, snooping around and examining,
and old Nat Parsons was there, too. The professor kept fussing around
getting ready, and the people went ashore, drifting out one at a time, and
old Nat he was the last. Of course it wouldn't do to let him go out behind
US. We mustn't budge till he was gone, so we could be last ourselves.
But he was gone now, so it was time for us to follow. I heard a big
shout, and turned around-the city was dropping from under us like a shot!
It made me sick all through, I was so scared. Jim turned gray and couldn't
say a word, and Tom didn't say nothing, but looked excited. The city went
on dropping down, and down, and down; but we didn't seem to be doing
nothing but just hang in the air and stand still. The houses got smaller
and smaller, and the city pulled itself together, closer and closer, and
the men and wagons got to looking like ants and bugs crawling around, and
the streets like threads and cracks; and then it all kind of melted
together, and there wasn't any city any more it was only a big scar on the
earth, and it seemed to me a body could see up the river and down the
river about a thousand miles, though of course it wasn't so much. By and
by the earth was a ball-just a round ball, of a dull color, with shiny
stripes wriggling and winding around over it, which was rivers. The Widder
Douglas always told me the earth was round like a ball, but I never took
any stock in a lot of them superstitions o' hers, and of course I paid no
attention to that one, because I could see myself that the world was the
shape of a plate, and flat. I used to go up on the hill, and take a look
around and prove it for myself, because I reckon the best way to get a
sure thing on a fact is to go and examine for yourself, and not take
anybody's say-so. But I had to give in now that the widder was right. That
is, she was right as to the rest of the world, but she warn't right about
the part our village is in; that part is the shape of a plate, and flat, I
take my oath!
The professor had been quiet all this time, as if he was asleep; but he
broke loose now, and he was mighty bitter. He says something like this:
"Idiots! They said it wouldn't go; and they wanted to examine it, and
spy around and get the secret of it out of me. But I beat them. Nobody
knows the secret but me. Nobody knows what makes it move but me; and it's
a new power-a new power, and a thousand times the strongest in the earth!
Steam's foolishness to it! They said I couldn't go to Europe. To Europe!
Why, there's power aboard to last five years, and feed for three months.
They are fools! What do they know about it? Yes, and they said my air-ship
was flimsy. Why, she's good for fifty years! I can sail the skies all my
life if I want to, and steer where I please, though they laughed at that,
and said I couldn't. Couldn't steer! Come here, boy; we'll see. You press
these buttons as I tell you."
He made Tom steer the ship all about and every which way, and learnt
him the whole thing in nearly no time; and Tom said it was perfectly easy.
He made him fetch the ship down 'most to the earth, and had him spin her
along so close to the Illinois prairies that a body could talk to the
farmers, and hear everything they said perfectly plain; and he flung out
printed bills to them that told about the balloon, and said it was going
to Europe. Tom got so he could steer straight for a tree till he got
nearly to it, and then dart up and skin right along over the top of it.
Yes, and he showed Tom how to land her; and he done it first-rate, too,
and set her down in the prairies as soft as wool. But the minute we
started to skip out the professor says, "No, you don't!" and shot her up
in the air again. It was awful. I begun to beg, and so did Jim; but it
only give his temper a rise, and he begun to rage around and look wild out
of his eyes, and I was scared of him.
Well, then he got on to his troubles again, and mourned and grumbled
about the way he was treated, and couldn't seem to git over it, and
especially people's saying his ship was flimsy. He scoffed at that, and at
their saying she warn't simple and would be always getting out of order.
Get out of order! That graveled him; he said that she couldn't any more
get out of order than the solar sister.
He got worse and worse, and I never see a person take on so. It give me
the cold shivers to see him, and so it did Jim. By and by he got to
yelling and screaming, and then he swore the world shouldn't ever have his
secret at all now, it had treated him so mean. He said he would sail his
balloon around the globe just to show what he could do, and then he would
sink it in the sea, and sink us all along with it, too. Well, it was the
awfulest fix to be in, and here was night coming on!
He give us something to eat, and made us go to the other end of the
boat, and he laid down on a locker, where he could boss all the works, and
put his old pepper-box revolver under his head, and said if anybody come
fooling around there trying to land her, he would kill him.
We set scrunched up together, and thought considerable, but didn't say
much-only just a word once in a while when a body had to say something or
bust, we was so scared and worried. The night dragged along slow and
lonesome. We was pretty low down, and the moonshine made everything soft
and pretty, and the farmhouses looked snug and homeful, and we could hear
the farm sounds, and wished we could be down there; but, laws! we just
slipped along over them like a ghost, and never left a track.
Away in the night, when all the sounds was late sounds, and the air had
a late feel, and a late smell, too-about a two-o'clock feel, as near as I
could make out-Tom said the professor was so quiet this time he must be
asleep, and we'd better-
"Better what?" I says in a whisper, and feeling sick all over, because
I knowed what he was thinking about.
"Better slip back there and tie him, and land the ship," he says.
I says: "No, sir! Don' you budge, Tom Sawyer."
And Jim-well, Jim was kind o' gasping, he was so scared. He says:
"Oh, Mars Tom, DON'T! Ef you teches him, we's gone-we's gone sho'! I
ain't gwine anear him, not for nothin' in dis worl'. Mars Tom, he's plumb
crazy."
Tom whispers and says-"That's WHY we've got to do something. If he
wasn't crazy I wouldn't give shucks to be anywhere but here; you couldn't
hire me to get out-now that I've got used to this balloon and over the
scare of being cut loose from the solid ground-if he was in his right
mind. But it's no good politics, sailing around like this with a person
that's out of his head, and says he's going round the world and then drown
us all. We've GOT to do something, I tell you, and do it before he wakes
up, too, or we mayn't ever get another chance. Come!"
But it made us turn cold and creepy just to think of it, and we said we
wouldn't budge. So Tom was for slipping back there by himself to see if he
couldn't get at the steering-gear and land the ship. We begged and begged
him not to, but it warn't no use; so he got down on his hands and knees,
and begun to crawl an inch at a time, we a-holding our breath and
watching. After he got to the middle of the boat he crept slower than
ever, and it did seem like years to me. But at last we see him get to the
professor's head, and sort of raise up soft and look a good spell in his
face and listen. Then we see him begin to inch along again toward the
professor's feet where the steering-buttons was. Well, he got there all
safe, and was reaching slow and steady toward the buttons, but he knocked
down something that made a noise, and we see him slump down flat an' soft
in the bottom, and lay still. The professor stirred, and says, "What's
that?" But everybody kept dead still and quiet, and he begun to mutter and
mumble and nestle, like a person that's going to wake up, and I thought I
was going to die, I was so worried and scared.
Then a cloud slid over the moon, and I 'most cried, I was so glad. She
buried herself deeper and deeper into the cloud, and it got so dark we
couldn't see Tom. Then it began to sprinkle rain, and we could hear the
professor fussing at his ropes and things and abusing the weather. We was
afraid every minute he would touch Tom, and then we would be goners, and
no help; but Tom was already on his way back, and when we felt his hands
on our knees my breath stopped sudden, and my heart fell down 'mongst my
other works, because I couldn't tell in the dark but it might be the
professor! which I thought it WAS.
Dear! I was so glad to have him back that I was just as near happy as a
person could be that was up in the air that way with a deranged man. You
can't land a balloon in the dark, and so I hoped it would keep on raining,
for I didn't want Tom to go meddling any more and make us so awful
uncomfortable. Well, I got my wish. It drizzled and drizzled along the
rest of the night, which wasn't long, though it did seem so; and at
daybreak it cleared, and the world looked mighty soft and gray and pretty,
and the forests and fields so good to see again, and the horses and cattle
standing sober and thinking. Next, the sun come ablazing up gay and
splendid, and then we began to feel rusty and stretchy, and first we
knowed we was all asleep.
Chapter III. TOM EXPLAINS
WE went to sleep about four o'clock, and woke up about eight. The
professor was setting back there at his end, looking glum. He pitched us
some breakfast, but he told us not to come abaft the midship compass. That
was about the middle of the boat. Well, when you are sharp-set, and you
eat and satisfy yourself, everything looks pretty different from what it
done before. It makes a body feel pretty near comfortable, even when he is
up in a balloon with a genius. We got to talking together.
There was one thing that kept bothering me, and by and by I says:
"Tom, didn't we start east?"
"Yes."
"How fast have we been going?"
"Well, you heard what the professor said when he was raging round.
Sometimes, he said, we was making fifty miles an hour, sometimes ninety,
sometimes a hundred; said that with a gale to help he could make three
hundred any time, and said if he wanted the gale, and wanted it blowing
the right direction, he only had to go up higher or down lower to find
it."
"Well, then, it's just as I reckoned. The professor lied."
"Why?"
"Because if we was going so fast we ought to be past Illinois, oughtn't
we?"
"Certainly."
"Well, we ain't."
"What's the reason we ain't?"
"I know by the color. We're right over Illinois yet. And you can see
for yourself that Indiana ain't in sight."
"I wonder what's the matter with you, Huck. You know by the COLOR?"
"Yes, of course I do."
"What's the color got to do with it?"
"It's got everything to do with it. Illinois is green, Indiana is pink.
You show me any pink down here, if you can. No, sir; it's green."
"Indiana PINK? Why, what a lie!"
"It ain't no lie; I've seen it on the map, and it's pink."
You never see a person so aggravated and disgusted. He says:
"Well, if I was such a numbskull as you, Huck Finn, I would jump over.
Seen it on the map! Huck Finn, did you reckon the States was the same
color out-of-doors as they are on the map?"
"Tom Sawyer, what's a map for? Ain't it to learn you facts?"
"Of course."
"Well, then, how's it going to do that if it tells lies? That's what I
want to know."
"Shucks, you muggins! It don't tell lies."
"It don't, don't it?"
"No, it don't."
"All right, then; if it don't, there ain't no two States the same
color. You git around THAT if you can, Tom Sawyer."
He see I had him, and Jim see it too; and I tell you, I felt pretty
good, for Tom Sawyer was always a hard person to git ahead of. Jim slapped
his leg and says:
"I tell YOU! dat's smart, dat's right down smart. Ain't no use, Mars
Tom; he got you DIS time, sho'!" He slapped his leg again, and says, "My
LAN', but it was smart one!"
I never felt so good in my life; and yet I didn't know I was saying
anything much till it was out. I was just mooning along, perfectly
careless, and not expecting anything was going to happen, and never
THINKING of such a thing at all, when, all of a sudden, out it came. Why,
it was just as much a surprise to me as it was to any of them. It was just
the same way it is when a person is munching along on a hunk of corn-pone,
and not thinking about anything, and all of a sudden bites into a di'mond.
Now all that HE knows first off is that it's some kind of gravel he's bit
into; but he don't find out it's a di'mond till he gits it out and brushes
off the sand and crumbs and one thing or another, and has a look at it,
and then he's surprised and glad-yes, and proud too; though when you come
to look the thing straight in the eye, he ain't entitled to as much credit
as he would 'a' been if he'd been HUNTING di'monds. You can see the
difference easy if you think it over. You see, an accident, that way,
ain't fairly as big a thing as a thing that's done a-purpose. Anybody
could find that di'mond in that corn-pone; but mind you, it's got to be
somebody that's got THAT KIND OF A CORN-PONE. That's where that feller's
credit comes in, you see; and that's where mine comes in. I don't claim no
great things-I don't reckon I could 'a' done it again-but I done it that
time; that's all I claim. And I hadn't no more idea I could do such a
thing, and warn't any more thinking about it or trying to, than you be
this minute. Why, I was just as ca'm, a body couldn't be any ca'mer, and
yet, all of a sudden, out it come. I've often thought of that time, and I
can remember just the way everything looked, same as if it was only last
week. I can see it all: beautiful rolling country with woods and fields
and lakes for hundreds and hundreds of miles all around, and towns and
villages scattered everywheres under us, here and there and yonder; and
the professor mooning over a chart on his little table, and Tom's cap
flopping in the rigging where it was hung up to dry. And one thing in
particular was a bird right alongside, not ten foot off, going our way and
trying to keep up, but losing ground all the time; and a railroad train
doing the same thing down there, sliding among the trees and farms, and
pouring out a long cloud of black smoke and now and then a little puff of
white; and when the white was gone so long you had almost forgot it, you
would hear a little faint toot, and that was the whistle. And we left the
bird and the train both behind, 'WAY behind, and done it easy, too.
But Tom he was huffy, and said me and Jim was a couple of ignorant
blatherskites, and then he says:
"Suppose there's a brown calf and a big brown dog, and an artist is
making a picture of them. What is the MAIN thing that that artist has got
to do? He has got to paint them so you can tell them apart the minute you
look at them, hain't he? Of course. Well, then, do you want him to go and
paint BOTH of them brown? Certainly you don't. He paints one of them blue,
and then you can't make no mistake. It's just the same with the maps.
That's why they make every State a different color; it ain't to deceive
you, it's to keep you from deceiving yourself."
But I couldn't see no argument about that, and neither could Jim. Jim
shook his head, and says:
"Why, Mars Tom, if you knowed what chuckleheads dem painters is, you'd
wait a long time before you'd fetch one er DEM in to back up a fac'. I's
gwine to tell you, den you kin see for you'self. I see one of 'em
a-paintin' away, one day, down in ole Hank Wilson's back lot, en I went
down to see, en he was paintin' dat old brindle cow wid de near horn
gone-you knows de one I means. En I ast him what he's paintin' her for, en
he say when he git her painted, de picture's wuth a hundred dollars. Mars
Tom, he could a got de cow fer fifteen, en I tole him so. Well, sah, if
you'll b'lieve me, he jes' shuck his head, dat painter did, en went on
a-dobbin'. Bless you, Mars Tom, DEY don't know nothin'."
Tom lost his temper. I notice a person 'most always does that's got
laid out in an argument. He told us to shut up, and maybe we'd feel
better. Then he see a town clock away off down yonder, and he took up the
glass and looked at it, and then looked at his silver turnip, and then at
the clock, and then at the turnip again, and says:
"That's funny! That clock's near about an hour fast."
So he put up his turnip. Then he see another clock, and took a look,
and it was an hour fast too. That puzzled him.
"That's a mighty curious thing," he says. "I don't understand it."
Then he took the glass and hunted up another clock, and sure enough it
was an hour fast too. Then his eyes began to spread and his breath to come
out kinder gaspy like, and he says:
"Ger-reat Scott, it's the LONGITUDE!"
I says, considerably scared:
"Well, what's been and gone and happened now?"
"Why, the thing that's happened is that this old bladder has slid over
Illinois and Indiana and Ohio like nothing, and this is the east end of
Pennsylvania or New York, or somewheres around there."
"Tom Sawyer, you don't mean it!"
"Yes, I do, and it's dead sure. We've covered about fifteen degrees of
longitude since we left St. Louis yesterday afternoon, and them clocks are
right. We've come close on to eight hundred miles."
I didn't believe it, but it made the cold streaks trickle down my back
just the same. In my experience I knowed it wouldn't take much short of
two weeks to do it down the Mississippi on a raft. Jim was working his
mind and studying. Pretty soon he says:
"Mars Tom, did you say dem clocks uz right?"
"Yes, they're right."
"Ain't yo' watch right, too?"
"She's right for St. Louis, but she's an hour wrong for here."
"Mars Tom, is you tryin' to let on dat de time ain't de SAME
everywheres?"
"No, it ain't the same everywheres, by a long shot."
Jim looked distressed, and says:
"It grieves me to hear you talk like dat, Mars Tom; I's right down
ashamed to hear you talk like dat, arter de way you's been raised. Yassir,
it'd break yo' Aunt Polly's heart to hear you."
Tom was astonished. He looked Jim over wondering, and didn't say
nothing, and Jim went on:
"Mars Tom, who put de people out yonder in St. Louis? De Lord done it.
Who put de people here whar we is? De Lord done it. Ain' dey bofe his
children? 'Cose dey is. WELL, den! is he gwine to SCRIMINATE 'twixt 'em?"
"Scriminate! I never heard such ignorance. There ain't no
discriminating about it. When he makes you and some more of his children
black, and makes the rest of us white, what do you call that?"
Jim see the p'int. He was stuck. He couldn't answer. Tom says:
"He does discriminate, you see, when he wants to; but this case HERE
ain't no discrimination of his, it's man's. The Lord made the day, and he
made the night; but he didn't invent the hours, and he didn't distribute
them around. Man did that."
"Mars Tom, is dat so? Man done it?"
"Certainly."
"Who tole him he could?"
"Nobody. He never asked."
Jim studied a minute, and says:
"Well, dat do beat me. I wouldn't 'a' tuck no sich resk. But some
people ain't scared o' nothin'. Dey bangs right ahead; DEY don't care what
happens. So den dey's allays an hour's diff'unce everywhah, Mars Tom?"
"An hour? No! It's four minutes difference for every degree of
longitude, you know. Fifteen of 'em's an hour, thirty of 'em's two hours,
and so on. When it's one clock Tuesday morning in England, it's eight
o'clock the night before in New York."
Jim moved a little way along the locker, and you could see he was
insulted. He kept shaking his head and muttering, and so I slid along to
him and patted him on the leg, and petted him up, and got him over the
worst of his feelings, and then he says:
"Mars Tom talkin' sich talk as dat! Choosday in one place en Monday in
t'other, bofe in the same day! Huck, dis ain't no place to joke-up here
whah we is. Two days in one day! How you gwine to get two days inter one
day? Can't git two hours inter one hour, kin you? Can't git two niggers
inter one nigger skin, kin you? Can't git two gallons of whisky inter a
one-gallon jug, kin you? No, sir, 'twould strain de jug. Yes, en even den
you couldn't, I don't believe. Why, looky here, Huck, s'posen de Choosday
was New Year's-now den! is you gwine to tell me it's dis year in one place
en las' year in t'other, bofe in de identical same minute? It's de
beatenest rubbage! I can't stan' it-I can't stan' to hear tell 'bout it."
Then he begun to shiver and turn gray, and Tom says:
"NOW what's the matter? What's the trouble?"
Jim could hardly speak, but he says:
"Mars Tom, you ain't jokin', en it's SO?"
"No, I'm not, and it is so."
Jim shivered again, and says:
"Den dat Monday could be de las' day, en dey wouldn't be no las' day in
England, en de dead wouldn't be called. We mustn't go over dah, Mars Tom.
Please git him to turn back; I wants to be whah-"
All of a sudden we see something, and all jumped up, and forgot
everything and begun to gaze. Tom says:
"Ain't that the-" He catched his breath, then says: "It IS, sure as you
live! It's the ocean!"
That made me and Jim catch our breath, too. Then we all stood petrified
but happy, for none of us had ever seen an ocean, or ever expected to. Tom
kept muttering:
"Atlantic Ocean-Atlantic. Land, don't it sound great! And that's IT-and
WE are looking at it-we! Why, it's just too splendid to believe!"
Then we see a big bank of black smoke; and when we got nearer, it was a
city-and a monster she was, too, with a thick fringe of ships around one
edge; and we wondered if it was New York, and begun to jaw and dispute
about it, and, first we knowed, it slid from under us and went flying
behind, and here we was, out over the very ocean itself, and going like a
cyclone. Then we woke up, I tell you!
We made a break aft and raised a wail, and begun to beg the professor
to turn back and land us, but he jerked out his pistol and motioned us
back, and we went, but nobody will ever know how bad we felt.
The land was gone, all but a little streak, like a snake, away off on
the edge of the water, and down under us was just ocean, ocean,
ocean-millions of miles of it, heaving and pitching and squirming, and
white sprays blowing from the wave-tops, and only a few ships in sight,
wallowing around and laying over, first on one side and then on t'other,
and sticking their bows under and then their sterns; and before long there
warn't no ships at all, and we had the sky and the whole ocean all to
ourselves, and the roomiest place I ever see and the lonesomest.
AND it got lonesomer and lonesomer. There was the big sky up there,
empty and awful deep; and the ocean down there without a thing on it but
just the waves. All around us was a ring, where the sky and the water come
together; yes, a monstrous big ring it was, and we right in the dead
center of it-plumb in the center. We was racing along like a prairie fire,
but it never made any difference, we couldn't seem to git past that center
no way. I couldn't see that we ever gained an inch on that ring. It made a
body feel creepy, it was so curious and unaccountable.
Well, everything was so awful still that we got to talking in a very
low voice, and kept on getting creepier and lonesomer and less and less
talky, till at last the talk ran dry altogether, and we just set there and
"thunk," as Jim calls it, and never said a word the longest time.
The professor never stirred till the sun was overhead, then he stood up
and put a kind of triangle to his eye, and Tom said it was a sextant and
he was taking the sun to see whereabouts the balloon was. Then he ciphered
a little and looked in a book, and then he begun to carry on again. He
said lots of wild things, and, among others, he said he would keep up this
hundred-mile gait till the middle of to-morrow afternoon, and then he'd
land in London.
We said we would be humbly thankful.
He was turning away, but he whirled around when we said that, and give
us a long look of his blackest kind-one of the maliciousest and
suspiciousest looks I ever see. Then he says:
"You want to leave me. Don't try to deny it."
We didn't know what to say, so we held in and didn't say nothing at all.
He went aft and set down, but he couldn't seem to git that thing out of
his mind. Every now and then he would rip out something about it, and try
to make us answer him, but we dasn't.
It got lonesomer and lonesomer right along, and it did seem to me I
couldn't stand it. It was still worse when night begun to come on. By and
by Tom pinched me and whispers:
"Look!"
I took a glance aft, and see the professor taking a whet out of a
bottle. I didn't like the looks of that. By and by he took another drink,
and pretty soon he begun to sing. It was dark now, and getting black and
stormy. He went on singing, wilder and wilder, and the thunder begun to
mutter, and the wind to wheeze and moan among the ropes, and altogether it
was awful. It got so black we couldn't see him any more, and wished we
couldn't hear him, but we could. Then he got still; but he warn't still
ten minutes till we got suspicious, and wished he would start up his noise
again, so we could tell where he was. By and by there was a flash of
lightning, and we see him start to get up, but he staggered and fell down.
We heard him scream out in the dark:
"They don't want to go to England. All right, I'll change the course.
They want to leave me. I know they do. Well, they shall-and NOW!"
I 'most died when he said that. Then he was still again-still so long I
couldn't bear it, and it did seem to me the lightning wouldn't EVER come
again. But at last there was a blessed flash, and there he was, on his
hands and knees crawling, and not four feet from us. My, but his eyes was
terrible! He made a lunge for Tom, and says, "Overboard YOU go!" but it
was already pitch-dark again, and I couldn't see whether he got him or
not, and Tom didn't make a sound.
There was another long, horrible wait; then there was a flash, and I
see Tom's head sink down outside the boat and disappear. He was on the
rope-ladder that dangled down in the air from the gunnel. The professor
let off a shout and jumped for him, and straight off it was pitch-dark
again, and Jim groaned out, "Po' Mars Tom, he's a goner!" and made a jump
for the professor, but the professor warn't there.
Then we heard a couple of terrible screams, and then another not so
loud, and then another that was 'way below, and you could only JUST hear
it; and I heard Jim say, "Po' Mars Tom!"
Then it was awful still, and I reckon a person could 'a' counted four
thousand before the next flash come. When it come I see Jim on his knees,
with his arms on the locker and his face buried in them, and he was
crying. Before I could look over the edge it was all dark again, and I was
glad, because I didn't want to see. But when the next flash come, I was
watching, and down there I see somebody a-swinging in the wind on the
ladder, and it was Tom!
"Come up!" I shouts; "come up, Tom!"
His voice was so weak, and the wind roared so, I couldn't make out what
he said, but I thought he asked was the professor up there. I shouts:
"No, he's down in the ocean! Come up! Can we help you?"
Of course, all this in the dark.
"Huck, who is you hollerin' at?"
"I'm hollerin' at Tom."
"Oh, Huck, how kin you act so, when you know po' Mars Tom-" Then he let
off an awful scream, and flung his head and his arms back and let off
another one, because there was a white glare just then, and he had raised
up his face just in time to see Tom's, as white as snow, rise above the
gunnel and look him right in the eye. He thought it was Tom's ghost, you
see.
Tom clumb aboard, and when Jim found it WAS him, and not his ghost, he
hugged him, and called him all sorts of loving names, and carried on like
he was gone crazy, he was so glad. Says I:
"What did you wait for, Tom? Why didn't you come up at first?"
"I dasn't, Huck. I knowed somebody plunged down past me, but I didn't
know who it was in the dark. It could 'a' been you, it could 'a' been
Jim."
That was the way with Tom Sawyer-always sound. He warn't coming up till
he knowed where the professor was.
The storm let go about this time with all its might; and it was
dreadful the way the thunder boomed and tore, and the lightning glared
out, and the wind sung and screamed in the rigging, and the rain come
down. One second you couldn't see your hand before you, and the next you
could count the threads in your coatsleeve, and see a whole wide desert of
waves pitching and tossing through a kind of veil of rain. A storm like
that is the loveliest thing there is, but it ain't at its best when you
are up in the sky and lost, and it's wet and lonesome, and there's just
been a death in the family.
We set there huddled up in the bow, and talked low about the poor
professor; and everybody was sorry for him, and sorry the world had made
fun of him and treated him so harsh, when he was doing the best he could,
and hadn't a friend nor nobody to encourage him and keep him from brooding
his mind away and going deranged. There was plenty of clothes and blankets
and everything at the other end, but we thought we'd ruther take the rain
than go meddling back there.
WE tried to make some plans, but we couldn't come to no agreement. Me
and Jim was for turning around and going back home, but Tom allowed that
by the time daylight come, so we could see our way, we would be so far
toward England that we might as well go there, and come back in a ship,
and have the glory of saying we done it.
About midnight the storm quit and the moon come out and lit up the
ocean, and we begun to feel comfortable and drowsy; so we stretched out on
the lockers and went to sleep, and never woke up again till sun-up. The
sea was sparkling like di'monds, and it was nice weather, and pretty soon
our things was all dry again.
We went aft to find some breakfast, and the first thing we noticed was
that there was a dim light burning in a compass back there under a hood.
Then Tom was disturbed. He says:
"You know what that means, easy enough. It means that somebody has got
to stay on watch and steer this thing the same as he would a ship, or
she'll wander around and go wherever the wind wants her to."
"Well," I says, "what's she been doing since-er-since we had the
accident?"
"Wandering," he says, kinder troubled-" wandering, without any doubt.
She's in a wind now that's blowing her south of east. We don't know how
long that's been going on, either."
So then he p'inted her east, and said he would hold her there till we
rousted out the breakfast. The professor had laid in everything a body
could want; he couldn't 'a' been better fixed. There wasn't no milk for
the coffee, but there was water, and everything else you could want, and a
charcoal stove and the fixings for it, and pipes and cigars and matches;
and wine and liquor, which warn't in our line; and books, and maps, and
charts, and an accordion; and furs, and blankets, and no end of rubbish,
like brass beads and brass jewelry, which Tom said was a sure sign that he
had an idea of visiting among savages. There was money, too. Yes, the
professor was well enough fixed.
After breakfast Tom learned me and Jim how to steer, and divided us all
up into four-hour watches, turn and turn about; and when his watch was out
I took his place, and he got out the professor's papers and pens and wrote
a letter home to his aunt Polly, telling her everything that had happened
to us, and dated it "IN THE WELKIN, APPROACHING ENGLAND," and folded it
together and stuck it fast with a red wafer, and directed it, and wrote
above the direction, in big writing, "FROM TOM SAWYER, THE ERRONORT," and
said it would stump old Nat Parsons, the postmaster, when it come along in
the mail. I says:
"Tom Sawyer, this ain't no welkin, it's a balloon."
"Well, now, who SAID it was a welkin, smarty?"
"You've wrote it on the letter, anyway."
"What of it? That don't mean that the balloon's the welkin."
"Oh, I thought it did. Well, then, what is a welkin?"
I see in a minute he was stuck. He raked and scraped around in his
mind, but he couldn't find nothing, so he had to say:
"I don't know, and nobody don't know. It's just a word, and it's a
mighty good word, too. There ain't many that lays over it. I don't believe
there's ANY that does."
"Shucks!" I says. "But what does it MEAN?-that's the p'int. "
"I don't know what it means, I tell you. It's a word that people uses
for-for-well, it's ornamental. They don't put ruffles on a shirt to keep a
person warm, do they?"
"Course they don't."
"But they put them ON, don't they?"
"Yes."
"All right, then; that letter I wrote is a shirt, and the welkin's the
ruffle on it."
I judged that that would gravel Jim, and it did.
"Now, Mars Tom, it ain't no use to talk like dat; en, moreover, it's
sinful. You knows a letter ain't no shirt, en dey ain't no ruffles on it,
nuther. Dey ain't no place to put 'em on; you can't put em on, and dey
wouldn't stay ef you did."
"Oh DO shut up, and wait till something's started that you know
something about."
"Why, Mars Tom, sholy you can't mean to say I don't know about shirts,
when, goodness knows, I's toted home de washin' ever sence-"
"I tell you, this hasn't got anything to do with shirts. I only-"
"Why, Mars Tom, you said yo'self dat a letter-"
"Do you want to drive me crazy? Keep still. I only used it as a
metaphor."
That word kinder bricked us up for a minute. Then Jim says-rather
timid, because he see Tom was getting pretty tetchy:
"Mars Tom, what is a metaphor?"
"A metaphor's a-well, it's a-a-a metaphor's an illustration." He see
THAT didn't git home, so he tried again. "When I say birds of a feather
flocks together, it's a metaphorical way of saying-"
"But dey DON'T, Mars Tom. No, sir, 'deed dey don't. Dey ain't no
feathers dat's more alike den a bluebird en a jaybird, but ef you waits
till you catches dem birds together, you'll-"
"Oh, give us a rest! You can't get the simplest little thing through
your thick skull. Now don't bother me any more."
Jim was satisfied to stop. He was dreadful pleased with himself for
catching Tom out. The minute Tom begun to talk about birds I judged he was
a goner, because Jim knowed more about birds than both of us put together.
You see, he had killed hundreds and hundreds of them, and that's the way
to find out about birds. That's the way people does that writes books
about birds, and loves them so that they'll go hungry and tired and take
any amount of trouble to find a new bird and kill it. Their name is
ornithologers, and I could have been an ornithologer myself, because I
always loved birds and creatures; and I started out to learn how to be
one, and I see a bird setting on a limb of a high tree, singing with its
head tilted back and its mouth open, and before I thought I fired, and his
song stopped and he fell straight down from the limb, all limp like a rag,
and I run and picked him up and he was dead, and his body was warm in my
hand, and his head rolled about this way and that, like his neck was
broke, and there was a little white skin over his eyes, and one little
drop of blood on the side of his head; and, laws! I couldn't see nothing
more for the tears; and I hain't never murdered no creature since that
warn't doing me no harm, and I ain't going to.
But I was aggravated about that welkin. I wanted to know. I got the
subject up again, and then Tom explained, the best he could. He said when
a person made a big speech the newspapers said the shouts of the people
made the welkin ring. He said they always said that, but none of them ever
told what it was, so he allowed it just meant outdoors and up high. Well,
that seemed sensible enough, so I was satisfied, and said so. That pleased
Tom and put him in a good humor again, and he says:
"Well, it's all right, then; and we'll let bygones be bygones. I don't
know for certain what a welkin is, but when we land in London we'll make
it ring, anyway, and don't you forget it."
He said an erronort was a person who sailed around in balloons; and
said it was a mighty sight finer to be Tom Sawyer the Erronort than to be
Tom Sawyer the Traveler, and we would be heard of all round the world, if
we pulled through all right, and so he wouldn't give shucks to be a
traveler now.
Toward the middle of the afternoon we got everything ready to land, and
we felt pretty good, too, and proud; and we kept watching with the
glasses, like Columbus discovering America. But we couldn't see nothing
but ocean. The afternoon wasted out and the sun shut down, and still there
warn't no land anywheres. We wondered what was the matter, but reckoned it
would come out all right, so we went on steering east, but went up on a
higher level so we wouldn't hit any steeples or mountains in the dark.
It was my watch till midnight, and then it was Jim's; but Tom stayed
up, because he said ship captains done that when they was making the land,
and didn't stand no regular watch.
Well, when daylight come, Jim give a shout, and we jumped up and looked
over, and there was the land sure enough-land all around, as far as you
could see, and perfectly level and yaller. We didn't know how long we'd
been over it. There warn't no trees, nor hills, nor rocks, nor towns, and
Tom and Jim had took it for the sea. They took it for the sea in a dead
ca'm; but we was so high up, anyway, that if it had been the sea and
rough, it would 'a' looked smooth, all the same, in the night, that way.
We was all in a powerful excitement now, and grabbed the glasses and
hunted everywheres for London, but couldn't find hair nor hide of it, nor
any other settlement-nor any sign of a lake or a river, either. Tom was
clean beat. He said it warn't his notion of England; he thought England
looked like America, and always had that idea. So he said we better have
breakfast, and then drop down and inquire the quickest way to London. We
cut the breakfast pretty short, we was so impatient. As we slanted along
down, the weather began to moderate, and pretty soon we shed our furs. But
it kept ON moderating, and in a precious little while it was 'most too
moderate. We was close down now, and just blistering!
We settled down to within thirty foot of the land-that is, it was land
if sand is land; for this wasn't anything but pure sand. Tom and me clumb
down the ladder and took a run to stretch our legs, and it felt amazing
good-that is, the stretching did, but the sand scorched our feet like hot
embers. Next, we see somebody coming, and started to meet him; but we
heard Jim shout, and looked around and he was fairly dancing, and making
signs, and yelling. We couldn't make out what he said, but we was scared
anyway, and begun to heel it back to the balloon. When we got close
enough, we understood the words, and they made me sick:
"Run! Run fo' yo' life! Hit's a lion; I kin see him thoo de glass! Run,
boys; do please heel it de bes' you kin. He's bu'sted outen de menagerie,
en dey ain't nobody to stop him!"
It made Tom fly, but it took the stiffening all out of my legs. I could
only just gasp along the way you do in a dream when there's a ghost
gaining on you.
Tom got to the ladder and shinned up it a piece and waited for me; and
as soon as I got a foothold on it he shouted to Jim to soar away. But Jim
had clean lost his head, and said he had forgot how. So Tom shinned along
up and told me to follow; but the lion was arriving, fetching a most
ghastly roar with every lope, and my legs shook so I dasn't try to take
one of them out of the rounds for fear the other one would give way under
me.
But Tom was aboard by this time, and he started the balloon up a
little, and stopped it again as soon as the end of the ladder was ten or
twelve feet above ground. And there was the lion, a-ripping around under
me, and roaring and springing up in the air at the ladder, and only
missing it about a quarter of an inch, it seemed to me. It was delicious
to be out of his reach, perfectly delicious, and made me feel good and
thankful all up one side; but I was hanging there helpless and couldn't
climb, and that made me feel perfectly wretched and miserable all down the
other. It is most seldom that a person feels so mixed like that; and it is
not to be recommended, either.
Tom asked me what he'd better do, but I didn't know. He asked me if I
could hold on whilst he sailed away to a safe place and left the lion
behind. I said I could if he didn't go no higher than he was now; but if
he went higher I would lose my head and fall, sure. So he said, "Take a
good grip," and he started.
"Don't go so fast," I shouted. "It makes my head swim."
He had started like a lightning express. He slowed down, and we glided
over the sand slower, but still in a kind of sickening way; for it IS
uncomfortable to see things sliding and gliding under you like that, and
not a sound.
But pretty soon there was plenty of sound, for the lion was catching
up. His noise fetched others. You could see them coming on the lope from
every direction, and pretty soon there was a couple of dozen of them under
me, jumping up at the ladder and snarling and snapping at each other; and
so we went skimming along over the sand, and these fellers doing what they
could to help us to not forgit the occasion; and then some other beasts
come, without an invite, and they started a regular riot down there. We
see this plan was a mistake. We couldn't ever git away from them at this
gait, and I couldn't hold on forever. So Tom took a think, and struck
another idea. That was, to kill a lion with the pepper-box revolver, and
then sail away while the others stopped to fight over the carcass. So he
stopped the balloon still, and done it, and then we sailed off while the
fuss was going on, and come down a quarter of a mile off, and they helped
me aboard; but by the time we was out of reach again, that gang was on
hand once more. And when they see we was really gone and they couldn't get
us, they sat down on their hams and looked up at us so kind of
disappointed that it was as much as a person could do not to see THEIR
side of the matter.
Chapter VI. IT'S A CARAVAN
I WAS so weak that the only thing I wanted was a chance to lay down, so
I made straight for my locker-bunk, and stretched myself out there. But a
body couldn't get back his strength in no such oven as that, so Tom give
the command to soar, and Jim started her aloft.
We had to go up a mile before we struck comfortable weather where it
was breezy and pleasant and just right, and pretty soon I was all straight
again. Tom had been setting quiet and thinking; but now he jumps up and
says:
"I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are. We're in the Great
Sahara, as sure as guns!"
He was so excited he couldn't hold still; but I wasn't. I says:
"Well, then, where's the Great Sahara? In England or in Scotland?"
"'Tain't in either; it's in Africa."
Jim's eyes bugged out, and he begun to stare down with no end of
interest, because that was where his originals come from; but I didn't
more than half believe it. I couldn't, you know; it seemed too awful far
away for us to have traveled.
But Tom was full of his discovery, as he called it, and said the lions
and the sand meant the Great Desert, sure. He said he could 'a' found out,
before we sighted land, that we was crowding the land somewheres, if he
had thought of one thing; and when we asked him what, he said:
"These clocks. They're chronometers. You always read about them in sea
voyages. One of them is keeping Grinnage time, and the other is keeping
St. Louis time, like my watch. When we left St. Louis it was four in the
afternoon by my watch and this clock, and it was ten at night by this
Grinnage clock. Well, at this time of the year the sun sets at about seven
o'clock. Now I noticed the time yesterday evening when the sun went down,
and it was half-past five o'clock by the Grinnage clock, and half past 11
A.M. by my watch and the other clock. You see, the sun rose and set by my
watch in St. Louis, and the Grinnage clock was six hours fast; but we've
come so far east that it comes within less than half an hour of setting by
the Grinnage clock now, and I'm away out-more than four hours and a half
out. You see, that meant that we was closing up on the longitude of
Ireland, and would strike it before long if we was p'inted right-which we
wasn't. No, sir, we've been a-wandering-wandering 'way down south of east,
and it's my opinion we are in Africa. Look at this map. You see how the
shoulder of Africa sticks out to the west. Think how fast we've traveled;
if we had gone straight east we would be long past England by this time.
You watch for noon, all of you, and we'll stand up, and when we can't cast
a shadow we'll find that this Grinnage clock is coming mighty close to
marking twelve. Yes, sir, I think we're in Africa; and it's just bully."
Jim was gazing down with the glass. He shook his head and says:
"Mars Tom, I reckon dey's a mistake som'er's. hain't seen no niggers
yit."
"That's nothing; they don't live in the desert. What is that, 'way off
yonder? Gimme a glass."
He took a long look, and said it was like a black string stretched
across the sand, but he couldn't guess what it was.
"Well," I says, "I reckon maybe you've got a chance now to find out
whereabouts this balloon is, because as like as not that is one of these
lines here, that's on the map, that you call meridians of longitude, and
we can drop down and look at its number, and-"
"Oh, shucks, Huck Finn, I never see such a lunkhead as you. Did you
s'pose there's meridians of longitude on the EARTH?"
"Tom Sawyer, they're set down on the map, and you know it perfectly
well, and here they are, and you can see for yourself."
"Of course they're on the map, but that's nothing; there ain't any on
the GROUND."
"Tom, do you know that to be so?"
"Certainly I do."
"Well, then, that map's a liar again. I never see such a liar as that
map."
He fired up at that, and I was ready for him, and Jim was warming his
opinion, too, and next minute we'd 'a' broke loose on another argument, if
Tom hadn't dropped the glass and begun to clap his hands like a maniac and
sing out:
"Camels!-Camels!"
So I grabbed a glass and Jim, too, and took a look, but I was
disappointed, and says:
"Camels your granny; they're spiders."
"Spiders in a desert, you shad? Spiders walking in a procession? You
don't ever reflect, Huck Finn, and I reckon you really haven't got
anything to reflect WITH. Don't you know we're as much as a mile up in the
air, and that that string of crawlers is two or three miles away? Spiders,
good land! Spiders as big as a cow? Perhaps you'd like to go down and milk
one of 'em. But they're camels, just the same. It's a caravan, that's what
it is, and it's a mile long."
"Well, then, let's go down and look at it. I don't believe in it, and
ain't going to till I see it and know it."
"All right," he says, and give the command:
"Lower away."
As we come slanting down into the hot weather, we could see that it was
camels, sure enough, plodding along, an everlasting string of them, with
bales strapped to them, and several hundred men in long white robes, and a
thing like a shawl bound over their heads and hanging down with tassels
and fringes; and some of the men had long guns and some hadn't, and some
was riding and some was walking. And the weatherJ-well, it was just
roasting. And how slow they did creep along! We swooped down now, all of a
sudden, and stopped about a hundred yards over their heads.
The men all set up a yell, and some of them fell flat on their
stomachs, some begun to fire their guns at us, and the rest broke and
scampered every which way, and so did the camels.
We see that we was making trouble, so we went up again about a mile, to
the cool weather, and watched them from there. It took them an hour to get
together and form the procession again; then they started along, but we
could see by the glasses that they wasn't paying much attention to
anything but us. We poked along, looking down at them with the glasses,
and by and by we see a big sand mound, and something like people the other
side of it, and there was something like a man laying on top of the mound
that raised his head up every now and then, and seemed to be watching the
caravan or us, we didn't know which. As the caravan got nearer, he sneaked
down on the other side and rushed to the other men and horses-for that is
what they was-and we see them mount in a hurry; and next, here they come,
like a house afire, some with lances and some with long guns, and all of
them yelling the best they could.
They come a-tearing down on to the caravan, and the next minute both
sides crashed together and was all mixed up, and there was such another
popping of guns as you never heard, and the air got so full of smoke you
could only catch glimpses of them struggling together. There must 'a' been
six hundred men in that battle, and it was terrible to see. Then they
broke up into gangs and groups, fighting tooth and nail, and scurrying and
scampering around, and laying into each other like everything; and
whenever the smoke cleared a little you could see dead and wounded people
and camels scattered far and wide and all about, and camels racing off in
every direction.
At last the robbers see they couldn't win, so their chief sounded a
signal, and all that was left of them broke away and went scampering
across the plain. The last man to go snatched up a child and carried it
off in front of him on his horse, and a woman run screaming and begging
after him, and followed him away off across the plain till she was
separated a long ways from her people; but it warn't no use, and she had
to give it up, and we see her sink down on the sand and cover her face
with her hands. Then Tom took the hellum, and started for that yahoo, and
we come a-whizzing down and made a swoop, and knocked him out of the
saddle, child and all; and he was jarred considerable, but the child
wasn't hurt, but laid there working its hands and legs in the air like a
tumble-bug that's on its back and can't turn over. The man went staggering
off to overtake his horse, and didn't know what had hit him, for we was
three or four hundred yards up in the air by this time.
We judged the woman would go and get the child now; but she didn't. We
could see her, through the glass, still setting there, with her head bowed
down on her knees; so of course she hadn't seen the performance, and
thought her child was clean gone with the man. She was nearly a half a
mile from her people, so we thought we might go down to the child, which
was about a quarter of a mile beyond her, and snake it to her before the
caravan people could git to us to do us any harm; and besides, we reckoned
they had enough business on their hands for one while, anyway, with the
wounded. We thought we'd chance it, and we did. We swooped down and
stopped, and Jim shinned down the ladder and fetched up the kid, which was
a nice fat little thing, and in a noble good humor, too, considering it
was just out of a battle and been tumbled off of a horse; and then we
started for the mother, and stopped back of her and tolerable near by, and
Jim slipped down and crept up easy, and when he was close back of her the
child goo-goo'd, the way a child does, and she heard it, and whirled and
fetched a shriek of joy, and made a jump for the kid and snatched it and
hugged it, and dropped it and hugged Jim, and then snatched off a gold
chain and hung it around Jim's neck, and hugged him again, and jerked up
the child again, a-sobbing and glorifying all the time; and Jim he shoved
for the ladder and up it, and in a minute we was back up in the sky and
the woman was staring up, with the back of her head between her shoulders
and the child with its arms locked around her neck. And there she stood,
as long as we was in sight a-sailing away in the sky.
Chapter VII. TOM RESPECTS THE FLEA
"NOON!" says Tom, and so it was. His shadder was just a blot around his
feet. We looked, and the Grinnage clock was so close to twelve the
difference didn't amount to nothing. So Tom said London was right north of
us or right south of us, one or t'other, and he reckoned by the weather
and the sand and the camels it was north; and a good many miles north,
too; as many as from New York to the city of Mexico, he guessed.
Jim said he reckoned a balloon was a good deal the fastest thing in the
world, unless it might be some kinds of birds-a wild pigeon, maybe, or a
railroad.
But Tom said he had read about railroads in England going nearly a
hundred miles an hour for a little ways, and there never was a bird in the
world that could do that-except one, and that was a flea.
"A flea? Why, Mars Tom, in de fust place he ain't a bird, strickly
speakin'-"
"He ain't a bird, eh? Well, then, what is he?"
"I don't rightly know, Mars Tom, but I speck he's only jist a' animal.
No, I reckon dat won't do, nuther, he ain't big enough for a' animal. He
mus' be a bug. Yassir, dat's what he is, he's a bug."
"I bet he ain't, but let it go. What's your second place?"
"Well, in de second place, birds is creturs dat goes a long ways, but a
flea don't."
"He don't, don't he? Come, now, what IS a long distance, if you know?"
"Why, it's miles, and lots of 'em-anybody knows dat."
"Can't a man walk miles?"
"Yassir, he kin."
"As many as a railroad?"
"Yassir, if you give him time."
"Can't a flea?"
"Well-I s'pose so-ef you gives him heaps of time."
"Now you begin to see, don't you, that DISTANCE ain't the thing to
judge by, at all; it's the time it takes to go the distance IN that
COUNTS, ain't it?"
"Well, hit do look sorter so, but I wouldn't 'a' b'lieved it, Mars Tom."
"It's a matter of PROPORTION, that's what it is; and when you come to
gauge a thing's speed by its size, where's your bird and your man and your
railroad, alongside of a flea? The fastest man can't run more than about
ten miles in an hour-not much over ten thousand times his own length. But
all the books says any common ordinary third-class flea can jump a hundred
and fifty times his own length; yes, and he can make five jumps a second
too-seven hundred and fifty times his own length, in one little second-for
he don't fool away any time stopping and starting-he does them both at the
same time; you'll see, if you try to put your finger on him. Now that's a
common, ordinary, third-class flea's gait; but you take an Eyetalian
FIRST-class, that's been the pet of the nobility all his life, and hasn't
ever knowed what want or sickness or exposure was, and he can jump more
than three hundred times his own length, and keep it up all day, five such
jumps every second, which is fifteen hundred times his own length. Well,
suppose a man could go fifteen hundred times his own length in a
second-say, a mile and a half. It's ninety miles a minute; it's
considerable more than five thousand miles an hour. Where's your man
NOW?-yes, and your bird, and your railroad, and your balloon? Laws, they
don't amount to shucks 'longside of a flea. A flea is just a comet b'iled
down small."
Jim was a good deal astonished, and so was I. Jim said:
"Is dem figgers jist edjackly true, en no jokin' en no lies, Mars Tom?"
"Yes, they are; they're perfectly true."
"Well, den, honey, a body's got to respec' a flea. I ain't had no
respec' for um befo', sca'sely, but dey ain't no gittin' roun' it, dey do
deserve it, dat's certain."
"Well, I bet they do. They've got ever so much more sense, and brains,
and brightness, in proportion to their size, than any other cretur in the
world. A person can learn them 'most anything; and they learn it quicker
than any other cretur, too. They've been learnt to haul little carriages
in harness, and go this way and that way and t'other way according to
their orders; yes, and to march and drill like soldiers, doing it as
exact, according to orders, as soldiers does it. They've been learnt to do
all sorts of hard and troublesome things. S'pose you could cultivate a
flea up to the size of a man, and keep his natural smartness a-growing and
a-growing right along up, bigger and bigger, and keener and keener, in the
same proportion-where'd the human race be, do you reckon? That flea would
be President of the United States, and you couldn't any more prevent it
than you can prevent lightning."
"My lan', Mars Tom, I never knowed dey was so much TO de beas'. No,
sir, I never had no idea of it, and dat's de fac'."
"There's more to him, by a long sight, than there is to any other
cretur, man or beast, in proportion to size. He's the interestingest of
them all. People have so much to say about an ant's strength, and an
elephant's, and a locomotive's. Shucks, they don't begin with a flea. He
can lift two or three hundred times his own weight. And none of them can
come anywhere near it. And, moreover, he has got notions of his own, and
is very particular, and you can't fool him; his instinct, or his judgment,
or whatever it is, is perfectly sound and clear, and don't ever make a
mistake. People think all humans are alike to a flea. It ain't so. There's
folks that he won't go near, hungry or not hungry, and I'm one of them.
I've never had one of them on me in my life."
"Mars Tom!"
"It's so; I ain't joking."
"Well, sah, I hain't ever heard de likes o' dat befo'." Jim couldn't
believe it, and I couldn't; so we had to drop down to the sand and git a
supply and see. Tom was right. They went for me and Jim by the thousand,
but not a one of them lit on Tom. There warn't no explaining it, but there
it was and there warn't no getting around it. He said it had always been
just so, and he'd just as soon be where there was a million of them as
not; they'd never touch him nor bother him.
We went up to the cold weather to freeze 'em out, and stayed a little
spell, and then come back to the comfortable weather and went lazying
along twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, the way we'd been doing for the
last few hours. The reason was, that the longer we was in that solemn,
peaceful desert, the more the hurry and fuss got kind of soothed down in
us, and the more happier and contented and satisfied we got to feeling,
and the more we got to liking the desert, and then loving it. So we had
cramped the speed down, as I was saying, and was having a most noble good
lazy time, sometimes watching through the glasses, sometimes stretched out
on the lockers reading, sometimes taking a nap.
It didn't seem like we was the same lot that was in such a state to
find land and git ashore, but it was. But we had got over that-clean over
it. We was used to the balloon now and not afraid any more, and didn't
want to be anywheres else. Why, it seemed just like home; it 'most seemed
as if I had been born and raised in it, and Jim and Tom said the same. And
always I had had hateful people around me, a-nagging at me, and pestering
of me, and scolding, and finding fault, and fussing and bothering, and
sticking to me, and keeping after me, and making me do this, and making me
do that and t'other, and always selecting out the things I didn't want to
do, and then giving me Sam Hill because I shirked and done something else,
and just aggravating the life out of a body all the time; but up here in
the sky it was so still and sunshiny and lovely, and plenty to eat, and
plenty of sleep, and strange things to see, and no nagging and no
pestering, and no good people, and just holiday all the time. Land, I
warn't in no hurry to git out and buck at civilization again. Now, one of
the worst things about civilization is, that anybody that gits a letter
with trouble in it comes and tells you all about it and makes you feel
bad, and the newspapers fetches you the troubles of everybody all over the
world, and keeps you downhearted and dismal 'most all the time, and it's
such a heavy load for a person. I hate them newspapers; and I hate
letters; and if I had my way I wouldn't allow nobody to load his troubles
on to other folks he ain't acquainted with, on t'other side of the world,
that way. Well, up in a balloon there ain't any of that, and it's the
darlingest place there is.
We had supper, and that night was one of the prettiest nights I ever
see. The moon made it just like daylight, only a heap softer; and once we
see a lion standing all alone by himself, just all alone on the earth, it
seemed like, and his shadder laid on the sand by him like a puddle of ink.
That's the kind of moonlight to have.
Mainly we laid on our backs and talked; we didn't want to go to sleep.
Tom said we was right in the midst of the Arabian Nights now. He said it
was right along here that one of the cutest things in that book happened;
so we looked down and watched while he told about it, because there ain't
anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has
talked about. It was a tale about a camel-driver that had lost his camel,
and he come along in the desert and met a man, and says:
"Have you run across a stray camel to-day?"
And the man says:
"Was he blind in his left eye?"
"Yes."
"Had he lost an upper front tooth?"
"Yes."
"Was his off hind leg lame?"
"Yes."
"Was he loaded with millet-seed on one side and honey on the other?"
"Yes, but you needn't go into no more details-that's the one, and I'm
in a hurry. Where did you see him?"
"I hain't seen him at all," the man says.
"Hain't seen him at all? How can you describe him so close, then?"
"Because when a person knows how to use his eyes, everything has got a
meaning to it; but most people's eyes ain't any good to them. I knowed a
camel had been along, because I seen his track. I knowed he was lame in
his off hind leg because he had favored that foot and trod light on it,
and his track showed it. I knowed he was blind on his left side because he
only nibbled the grass on the right side of the trail. I knowed he had
lost an upper front tooth because where he bit into the sod his
teeth-print showed it. The millet-seed sifted out on one side-the ants
told me that; the honey leaked out on the other-the flies told me that. I
know all about your camel, but I hain't seen him."
Jim says:
"Go on, Mars Tom, hit's a mighty good tale, and powerful interestin'."
"That's all," Tom says.
"ALL?" says Jim, astonished. "What 'come o' de camel?"
"I don't know."
"Mars Tom, don't de tale say?"
"No."
Jim puzzled a minute, then he says:
"Well! Ef dat ain't de beatenes' tale ever I struck. Jist gits to de
place whah de intrust is gittin' red-hot, en down she breaks. Why, Mars
Tom, dey ain't no SENSE in a tale dat acts like dat. Hain't you got no
IDEA whether de man got de camel back er not?"
"No, I haven't."
I see myself there warn't no sense in the tale, to chop square off that
way before it come to anything, but I warn't going to say so, because I
could see Tom was souring up pretty fast over the way it flatted out and
the way Jim had popped on to the weak place in it, and I don't think it's
fair for everybody to pile on to a feller when he's down. But Tom he
whirls on me and says:
"What do YOU think of the tale?"
Of course, then, I had to come out and make a clean breast and say it
did seem to me, too, same as it did to Jim, that as long as the tale
stopped square in the middle and never got to no place, it really warn't
worth the trouble of telling.
Tom's chin dropped on his breast, and 'stead of being mad, as I
reckoned he'd be, to hear me scoff at his tale that way, he seemed to be
only sad; and he says:
"Some people can see, and some can't-just as that man said. Let alone a
camel, if a cyclone had gone by, YOU duffers wouldn't 'a' noticed the
track."
I don't know what he meant by that, and he didn't say; it was just one
of his irrulevances, I reckon-he was full of them, sometimes, when he was
in a close place and couldn't see no other way out-but I didn't mind. We'd
spotted the soft place in that tale sharp enough, he couldn't git away
from that little fact. It graveled him like the nation, too, I reckon,
much as he tried not to let on.
Chapter VIII. THE DISAPPEARING LAKE
WE had an early breakfast in the morning, and set looking down on the
desert, and the weather was ever so bammy and lovely, although we warn't
high up. You have to come down lower and lower after sundown in the
desert, because it cools off so fast; and so, by the time it is getting
toward dawn, you are skimming along only a little ways above the sand.
We was watching the shadder of the balloon slide along the ground, and
now and then gazing off across the desert to see if anything was stirring,
and then down on the shadder again, when all of a sudden almost right
under us we see a lot of men and camels laying scattered about, perfectly
quiet, like they was asleep.
We shut off the power, and backed up and stood over them, and then we
see that they was all dead. It give us the cold shivers. And it made us
hush down, too, and talk low, like people at a funeral. We dropped down
slow and stopped, and me and Tom clumb down and went among them. There was
men, and women, and children. They was dried by the sun and dark and
shriveled and leathery, like the pictures of mummies you see in books. And
yet they looked just as human, you wouldn't 'a' believed it; just like
they was asleep.
Some of the people and animals was partly covered with sand, but most
of them not, for the sand was thin there, and the bed was gravel and hard.
Most of the clothes had rotted away; and when you took hold of a rag, it
tore with a touch, like spiderweb. Tom reckoned they had been laying there
for years.
Some of the men had rusty guns by them, some had swords on and had
shawl belts with long, silvermounted pistols stuck in them. All the camels
had their loads on yet, but the packs had busted or rotted and spilt the
freight out on the ground. We didn't reckon the swords was any good to the
dead people any more, so we took one apiece, and some pistols. We took a
small box, too, because it was so handsome and inlaid so fine; and then we
wanted to bury the people; but there warn't no way to do it that we could
think of, and nothing to do it with but sand, and that would blow away
again, of course.
Then we mounted high and sailed away, and pretty soon that black spot
on the sand was out of sight, and we wouldn't ever see them poor people
again in this world. We wondered, and reasoned, and tried to guess how
they come to be there, and how it all happened to them, but we couldn't
make it out. First we thought maybe they got lost, and wandered around and
about till their food and water give out and they starved to death; but
Tom said no wild animals nor vultures hadn't meddled with them, and so
that guess wouldn't do. So at last we give it up, and judged we wouldn't
think about it no more, because it made us low-spirited.
Then we opened the box, and it had gems and jewels in it, quite a pile,
and some little veils of the kind the dead women had on, with fringes made
out of curious gold money that we warn't acquainted with. We wondered if
we better go and try to find them again and give it back; but Tom thought
it over and said no, it was a country that was full of robbers, and they
would come and steal it; and then the sin would be on us for putting the
temptation in their way. So we went on; but I wished we had took all they
had, so there wouldn't 'a' been no temptation at all left.
We had had two hours of that blazing weather down there, and was
dreadful thirsty when we got aboard again. We went straight for the water,
but it was spoiled and bitter, besides being pretty near hot enough to
scald your mouth. We couldn't drink it. It was Mississippi river water,
the best in the world, and we stirred up the mud in it to see if that
would help, but no, the mud wasn't any better than the water. Well, we
hadn't been so very, very thirsty before, while we was interested in the
lost people, but we was now, and as soon as we found we couldn't have a
drink, we was more than thirty-five times as thirsty as we was a quarter
of a minute before. Why, in a little while we wanted to hold our mouths
open and pant like a dog.
Tom said to keep a sharp lookout, all around, everywheres, because we'd
got to find an oasis or there warn't no telling what would happen. So we
done it. We kept the glasses gliding around all the time, till our arms
got so tired we couldn't hold them any more. Two hours-three hours-just
gazing and gazing, and nothing but sand, sand, SAND, and you could see the
quivering heat-shimmer playing over it. Dear, dear, a body don't know what
real misery is till he is thirsty all the way through and is certain he
ain't ever going to come to any water any more. At last I couldn't stand
it to look around on them baking plains; I laid down on the locker, and
give it up.
But by and by Tom raised a whoop, and there she was! A lake, wide and
shiny, with pa'm-trees leaning over it asleep, and their shadders in the
water just as soft and delicate as ever you see. I never see anything look
so good. It was a long ways off, but that warn't anything to us; we just
slapped on a hundredmile gait, and calculated to be there in seven
minutes; but she stayed the same old distance away, all the time; we
couldn't seem to gain on her; yes, sir, just as far, and shiny, and like a
dream; but we couldn't get no nearer; and at last, all of a sudden, she
was gone!
Tom's eyes took a spread, and he says:
"Boys, it was a MYridge!" Said it like he was glad. I didn't see
nothing to be glad about. I says:
"Maybe. I don't care nothing about its name, the thing I want to know
is, what's become of it?"
Jim was trembling all over, and so scared he couldn't speak, but he
wanted to ask that question himself if he could 'a' done it. Tom says:
"What's BECOME of it? Why, you see yourself it's gone."
"Yes, I know; but where's it gone TO?"
He looked me over and says:
"Well, now, Huck Finn, where WOULD it go to! Don't you know what a
myridge is?"
"No, I don't. What is it?"
"It ain't anything but imagination. There ain't anything TO it. "
It warmed me up a little to hear him talk like that, and I says:
"What's the use you talking that kind of stuff, Tom Sawyer? Didn't I
see the lake?"
"Yes-you think you did."
"I don't think nothing about it, I DID see it."
"I tell you you DIDN'T see it either-because it warn't there to see."
It astonished Jim to hear him talk so, and he broke in and says, kind
of pleading and distressed:
"Mars Tom, PLEASE don't say sich things in sich an awful time as dis.
You ain't only reskin' yo' own self, but you's reskin' us-same way like
Anna Nias en Siffra. De lake WUZ dah-I seen it jis' as plain as I sees you
en Huck dis minute."
I says:
"Why, he seen it himself! He was the very one that seen it first. NOW,
then!"
"Yes, Mars Tom, hit's so-you can't deny it. We all seen it, en dat
PROVE it was dah."
"Proves it! How does it prove it?"
"Same way it does in de courts en everywheres, Mars Tom. One pusson
might be drunk, or dreamy or suthin', en he could be mistaken; en two
might, maybe; but I tell you, sah, when three sees a thing, drunk er
sober, it's SO. Dey ain't no gittin' aroun' dat, en you knows it, Mars
Tom."
"I don't know nothing of the kind. There used to be forty thousand
million people that seen the sun move from one side of the sky to the
other every day. Did that prove that the sun DONE it?"
"Course it did. En besides, dey warn't no 'casion to prove it. A body
'at's got any sense ain't gwine to doubt it. Dah she is now-a sailin' thoo
de sky, like she allays done."
Tom turned on me, then, and says:
"What do YOU say-is the sun standing still?"
"Tom Sawyer, what's the use to ask such a jackass question? Anybody
that ain't blind can see it don't stand still."
"Well," he says, "I'm lost in the sky with no company but a passel of
low-down animals that don't know no more than the head boss of a
university did three or four hundred years ago."
It warn't fair play, and I let him know it. I says:
"Throwin' mud ain't arguin', Tom Sawyer."
"Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness gracious, dah's de lake agi'n!"
yelled Jim, just then. "NOW, Mars Tom, what you gwine to say?"
Yes, sir, there was the lake again, away yonder across the desert,
perfectly plain, trees and all, just the same as it was before. I says:
"I reckon you're satisfied now, Tom Sawyer."
But he says, perfectly ca'm:
"Yes, satisfied there ain't no lake there."
Jim says:
"DON'T talk so, Mars Tom-it sk'yers me to hear you. It's so hot, en
you's so thirsty, dat you ain't in yo' right mine, Mars Tom. Oh, but don't
she look good! 'clah I doan' know how I's gwine to wait tell we gits dah,
I's SO thirsty."
"Well, you'll have to wait; and it won't do you no good, either,
because there ain't no lake there, I tell you."
I says:
"Jim, don't you take your eye off of it, and I won't, either."
"'Deed I won't; en bless you, honey, I couldn't ef I wanted to."
We went a-tearing along toward it, piling the miles behind us like
nothing, but never gaining an inch on it-and all of a sudden it was gone
again! Jim staggered, and 'most fell down. When he got his breath he says,
gasping like a fish:
"Mars Tom, hit's a GHOS', dat's what it is, en I hopes to goodness we
ain't gwine to see it no mo'. Dey's BEEN a lake, en suthin's happened, en
de lake's dead, en we's seen its ghos'; we's seen it twiste, en dat's
proof. De desert's ha'nted, it's ha'nted, sho; oh, Mars Tom, le''s git
outen it; I'd ruther die den have de night ketch us in it ag'in en de
ghos' er dat lake come a-mournin' aroun' us en we asleep en doan' know de
danger we's in."
"Ghost, you gander! It ain't anything but air and heat and thirstiness
pasted together by a person's imagination. If I-gimme the glass!"
He grabbed it and begun to gaze off to the right.
"It's a flock of birds," he says. "It's getting toward sundown, and
they're making a bee-line across our track for somewheres. They mean
business-maybe they're going for food or water, or both. Let her go to
starboard!-Port your hellum! Hard down! There-ease up-steady, as you go."
We shut down some of the power, so as not to outspeed them, and took
out after them. We went skimming along a quarter of a mile behind them,
and when we had followed them an hour and a half and was getting pretty
discouraged, and was thirsty clean to unendurableness, Tom says:
"Take the glass, one of you, and see what that is, away ahead of the
birds."
Jim got the first glimpse, and slumped down on the locker sick. He was
most crying, and says:
"She's dah ag'in, Mars Tom, she's dah ag'in, en I knows I's gwine to
die, 'case when a body sees a ghos' de third time, dat's what it means. I
wisht I'd never come in dis balloon, dat I does."
He wouldn't look no more, and what he said made me afraid, too, because
I knowed it was true, for that has always been the way with ghosts; so
then I wouldn't look any more, either. Both of us begged Tom to turn off
and go some other way, but he wouldn't, and said we was ignorant
superstitious blatherskites. Yes, and he'll git come up with, one of these
days, I says to myself, insulting ghosts that way. They'll stand it for a
while, maybe, but they won't stand it always, for anybody that knows about
ghosts knows how easy they are hurt, and how revengeful they are.
So we was all quiet and still, Jim and me being scared, and Tom busy.
By and by Tom fetched the balloon to a standstill, and says:
"NOW get up and look, you sapheads."
We done it, and there was the sure-enough water right under us!-clear,
and blue, and cool, and deep, and wavy with the breeze, the loveliest
sight that ever was. And all about it was grassy banks, and flowers, and
shady groves of big trees, looped together with vines, and all looking so
peaceful and comfortable-enough to make a body cry, it was so beautiful.
Jim DID cry, and rip and dance and carry on, he was so thankful and out
of his mind for joy. It was my watch, so I had to stay by the works, but
Tom and Jim clumb down and drunk a barrel apiece, and fetched me up a lot,
and I've tasted a many a good thing in my life, but nothing that ever
begun with that water.
Then we went down and had a swim, and then Tom came up and spelled me,
and me and Jim had a swim, and then Jim spelled Tom, and me and Tom had a
foot-race and a boxing-mill, and I don't reckon I ever had such a good
time in my life. It warn't so very hot, because it was close on to
evening, and we hadn't any clothes on, anyway. Clothes is well enough in
school, and in towns, and at balls, too, but there ain't no sense in them
when there ain't no civilization nor other kinds of bothers and fussiness
around.
"Lions a-comin'!-lions! Quick, Mars Tom! Jump for yo' life, Huck!"
Oh, and didn't we! We never stopped for clothes, but waltzed up the
ladder just so. Jim lost his head straight off-he always done it whenever
he got excited and scared; and so now, 'stead of just easing the ladder up
from the ground a little, so the animals couldn't reach it, he turned on a
raft of power, and we went whizzing up and was dangling in the sky before
he got his wits together and seen what a foolish thing he was doing. Then
he stopped her, but he had clean forgot what to do next; so there we was,
so high that the lions looked like pups, and we was drifting off on the
wind.
But Tom he shinned up and went for the works and begun to slant her
down, and back toward the lake, where the animals was gathering like a
camp-meeting, and I judged he had lost HIS head, too; for he knowed I was
too scared to climb, and did he want to dump me among the tigers and
things?
But no, his head was level, he knowed what he was about. He swooped
down to within thirty or forty feet of the lake, and stopped right over
the center, and sung out:
"Leggo, and drop!"
I done it, and shot down, feet first, and seemed to go about a mile
toward the bottom; and when I come up, he says:
"Now lay on your back and float till you're rested and got your pluck
back, then I'll dip the ladder in the water and you can climb aboard."
I done it. Now that was ever so smart in Tom, because if he had started
off somewheres else to drop down on the sand, the menagerie would 'a' come
along, too, and might 'a' kept us hunting a safe place till I got tuckered
out and fell.
And all this time the lions and tigers was sorting out the clothes, and
trying to divide them up so there would be some for all, but there was a
misunderstanding about it somewheres, on account of some of them trying to
hog more than their share; so there was another insurrection, and you
never see anything like it in the world. There must 'a' been fifty of
them, all mixed up together, snorting and roaring and snapping and biting
and tearing, legs and tails in the air, and you couldn't tell which was
which, and the sand and fur a-flying. And when they got done, some was
dead. and some was limping off crippled, and the rest was setting around
on the battlefield, some of them licking their sore places and the others
looking up at us and seemed to be kind of inviting us to come down and
have some fun, but which we didn't want any.
As for the clothes, they warn't any, any more. Every last rag of them
was inside of the animals; and not agreeing with them very well, I don't
reckon, for there was considerable many brass buttons on them, and there
was knives in the pockets, too, and smoking tobacco, and nails and chalk
and marbles and fishhooks and things. But I wasn't caring. All that was
bothering me was, that all we had now was the professor's clothes, a big
enough assortment, but not suitable to go into company with, if we came
across any, because the britches was as long as tunnels, and the coats and
things according. Still, there was everything a tailor needed, and Jim was
a kind of jack legged tailor, and he allowed he could soon trim a suit or
two down for us that would answer.
Chapter IX. TOM DISCOURSES ON THE DESERT
STILL, we thought we would drop down there a minute, but on another
errand. Most of the professor's cargo of food was put up in cans, in the
new way that somebody had just invented; the rest was fresh. When you
fetch Missouri beefsteak to the Great Sahara, you want to be particular
and stay up in the coolish weather. So we reckoned we would drop down into
the lion market and see how we could make out there.
We hauled in the ladder and dropped down till we was just above the
reach of the animals, then we let down a rope with a slip-knot in it and
hauled up a dead lion, a small tender one, then yanked up a cub tiger. We
had to keep the congregation off with the revolver, or they would 'a' took
a hand in the proceedings and helped.
We carved off a supply from both, and saved the skins, and hove the
rest overboard. Then we baited some of the professor's hooks with the
fresh meat and went a-fishing. We stood over the lake just a convenient
distance above the water, and catched a lot of the nicest fish you ever
see. It was a most amazing good supper we had; lion steak, tiger steak,
fried fish, and hot corn-pone. I don't want nothing better than that.
We had some fruit to finish off with. We got it out of the top of a
monstrous tall tree. It was a very slim tree that hadn't a branch on it
from the bottom plumb to the top, and there it bursted out like a
featherduster. It was a pa'm-tree, of course; anybody knows a pa'm-tree
the minute he see it, by the pictures. We went for cocoanuts in this one,
but there warn't none. There was only big loose bunches of things like
oversized grapes, and Tom allowed they was dates, because he said they
answered the description in the Arabian Nights and the other books. Of
course they mightn't be, and they might be poison; so we had to wait a
spell, and watch and see if the birds et them. They done it; so we done
it, too, and they was most amazing good.
By this time monstrous big birds begun to come and settle on the dead
animals. They was plucky creturs; they would tackle one end of a lion that
was being gnawed at the other end by another lion. If the lion drove the
bird away, it didn't do no good; he was back again the minute the lion was
busy.
The big birds come out of every part of the sky-you could make them out
with the glass while they was still so far away you couldn't see them with
your naked eye. Tom said the birds didn't find out the meat was there by
the smell; they had to find it out by seeing it. Oh, but ain't that an eye
for you! Tom said at the distance of five mile a patch of dead lions
couldn't look any bigger than a person's finger-nail, and he couldn't
imagine how the birds could notice such a little thing so far off.
It was strange and unnatural to see lion eat lion, and we thought maybe
they warn't kin. But Jim said that didn't make no difference. He said a
hog was fond of her own children, and so was a spider, and he reckoned
maybe a lion was pretty near as unprincipled though maybe not quite. He
thought likely a lion wouldn't eat his own father, if he knowed which was
him, but reckoned he would eat his brother-in-law if he was uncommon
hungry, and eat his mother-in-law any time. But RECKONING don't settle
nothing. You can reckon till the cows come home, but that don't fetch you
to no decision. So we give it up and let it drop.
Generly it was very still in the Desert nights, but this time there was
music. A lot of other animals come to dinner; sneaking yelpers that Tom
allowed was jackals, and roached-backed ones that he said was hyenas; and
all the whole biling of them kept up a racket all the time. They made a
picture in the moonlight that was more different than any picture I ever
see. We had a line out and made fast to the top of a tree, and didn't
stand no watch, but all turned in and slept; but I was up two or three
times to look down at the animals and hear the music. It was like having a
front seat at a menagerie for nothing, which I hadn't ever had before, and
so it seemed foolish to sleep and not make the most of it; I mightn't ever
have such a chance again.
We went a-fishing again in the early dawn, and then lazied around all
day in the deep shade on an island, taking turn about to watch and see
that none of the animals come a-snooping around there after erronorts for
dinner. We was going to leave the next day, but couldn't, it was too
lovely.
The day after, when we rose up toward the sky and sailed off eastward,
we looked back and watched that place till it warn't nothing but just a
speck in the Desert, and I tell you it was like saying good-bye to a
friend that you ain't ever going to see any more.
Jim was thinking to himself, and at last he says:
"Mars Tom, we's mos' to de end er de Desert now, I speck."
"Why?"
"Well, hit stan' to reason we is. You knows how long we's been
a-skimmin' over it. Mus' be mos' out o' san'. Hit's a wonder to me dat
it's hilt out as long as it has."
"Shucks, there's plenty sand, you needn't worry."
"Oh, I ain't a-worryin', Mars Tom, only wonderin', dat's all. De Lord's
got plenty san', I ain't doubtin' dat; but nemmine, He ain't gwyne to
WAS'E it jist on dat account; en I allows dat dis Desert's plenty big
enough now, jist de way she is, en you can't spread her out no mo' 'dout
was'in' san'."
"Oh, go 'long! we ain't much more than fairly STARTED across this
Desert yet. The United States is a pretty big country, ain't it? Ain't it,
Huck?"
"Yes," I says, "there ain't no bigger one, I don't reckon."
"Well," he says, "this Desert is about the shape of the United States,
and if you was to lay it down on top of the United States, it would cover
the land of the free out of sight like a blanket. There'd be a little
corner sticking out, up at Maine and away up northwest, and Florida
sticking out like a turtle's tail, and that's all. We've took California
away from the Mexicans two or three years ago, so that part of the Pacific
coast is ours now, and if you laid the Great Sahara down with her edge on
the Pacific, she would cover the United States and stick out past New York
six hundred miles into the Atlantic ocean."
I say:
"Good land! have you got the documents for that, Tom Sawyer?"
"Yes, and they're right here, and I've been studying them. You can look
for yourself. From New York to the Pacific is 2,600 miles. From one end of
the Great Desert to the other is 3,200. The United States contains
3,600,000 square miles, the Desert contains 4,162,000. With the Desert's
bulk you could cover up every last inch of the United States, and in under
where the edges projected out, you could tuck England, Scotland, Ireland,
France, Denmark, and all Germany. Yes, sir, you could hide the home of the
brave and all of them countries clean out of sight under the Great Sahara,
and you would still have 2,000 square miles of sand left."
"Well," I says, "it clean beats me. Why, Tom, it shows that the Lord
took as much pains makin' this Desert as makin' the United States and all
them other countries."
Jim says: "Huck, dat don' stan' to reason. I reckon dis Desert wa'n't
made at all. Now you take en look at it like dis-you look at it, and see
ef I's right. What's a desert good for? 'Taint good for nuthin'. Dey ain't
no way to make it pay. Hain't dat so, Huck?"
"Yes, I reckon."
"Hain't it so, Mars Tom?"
"I guess so. Go on."
"Ef a thing ain't no good, it's made in vain, ain't it?"
"Yes."
"NOW, den! Do de Lord make anything in vain? You answer me dat."
"Well-no, He don't."
"Den how come He make a desert?"
"Well, go on. How DID He come to make it?"
"Mars Tom, I b'lieve it uz jes like when you's buildin' a house; dey's
allays a lot o' truck en rubbish lef' over. What does you do wid it? Doan'
you take en k'yart it off en dump it into a ole vacant back lot? 'Course.
Now, den, it's my opinion hit was jes like dat-dat de Great Sahara warn't
made at all, she jes HAPPEN'."
I said it was a real good argument, and I believed it was the best one
Jim ever made. Tom he said the same, but said the trouble about arguments
is, they ain't nothing but THEORIES, after all, and theories don't prove
nothing, they only give you a place to rest on, a spell, when you are
tuckered out butting around and around trying to find out something there
ain't no way TO find out. And he says:
"There's another trouble about theories: there's always a hole in them
somewheres, sure, if you look close enough. It's just so with this one of
Jim's. Look what billions and billions of stars there is. How does it come
that there was just exactly enough starstuff, and none left over? How does
it come there ain't no sand-pile up there?"
But Jim was fixed for him and says:
"What's de Milky Way?-dat's what I want to know. What's de Milky Way?
Answer me dat!"
In my opinion it was just a sockdologer. It's only an opinion, it's
only MY opinion and others may think different; but I said it then and I
stand to it now-it was a sockdologer. And moreover, besides, it landed Tom
Sawyer. He couldn't say a word. He had that stunned look of a person
that's been shot in the back with a kag of nails. All he said was, as for
people like me and Jim, he'd just as soon have intellectual intercourse
with a catfish. But anybody can say that-and I notice they always do, when
somebody has fetched them a lifter. Tom Sawyer was tired of that end of
the subject.
So we got back to talking about the size of the Desert again, and the
more we compared it with this and that and t'other thing, the more nobler
and bigger and grander it got to look right along. And so, hunting among
the figgers, Tom found, by and by, that it was just the same size as the
Empire of China. Then he showed us the spread the Empire of China made on
the map, and the room she took up in the world. Well, it was wonderful to
think of, and I says:
"Why, I've heard talk about this Desert plenty of times, but I never
knowed before how important she was."
Then Tom says:
"Important! Sahara important! That's just the way with some people. If
a thing's big, it's important. That's all the sense they've got. All they
can see is SIZE. Why, look at England. It's the most important country in
the world; and yet you could put it in China's vest-pocket; and not only
that, but you'd have the dickens's own time to find it again the next time
you wanted it. And look at Russia. It spreads all around and everywhere,
and yet ain't no more important in this world than Rhode Island is, and
hasn't got half as much in it that's worth saving." Away off now we see a
little hill, a-standing up just on the edge of the world. Tom broke off
his talk, and reached for a glass very much excited, and took a look, and
says:
"That's it-it's the one I've been looking for, sure. If I'm right, it's
the one the dervish took the man into and showed him all the treasures."
So we begun to gaze, and he begun to tell about it out of the Arabian
Nights.
Chapter X. THE TREASURE-HILL
TOM said it happened like this.
A dervish was stumping it along through the Desert, on foot, one
blazing hot day, and he had come a thousand miles and was pretty poor, and
hungry, and ornery and tired, and along about where we are now he run
across a camel-driver with a hundred camels, and asked him for some a'ms.
But the cameldriver he asked to be excused. The dervish said:
"Don't you own these camels?"
"Yes, they're mine."
"Are you in debt?"
"Who-me? No."
"Well, a man that owns a hundred camels and ain't in debt is rich-and
not only rich, but very rich. Ain't it so?"
The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then the dervish says:
"God has made you rich, and He has made me poor. He has His reasons,
and they are wise, blessed be His name. But He has willed that His rich
shall help His poor, and you have turned away from me, your brother, in my
need, and He will remember this, and you will lose by it."
That made the camel-driver feel shaky, but all the same he was born
hoggish after money and didn't like to let go a cent; so he begun to whine
and explain, and said times was hard, and although he had took a full
freight down to Balsora and got a fat rate for it, he couldn't git no
return freight, and so he warn't making no great things out of his trip.
So the dervish starts along again, and says:
"All right, if you want to take the risk; but I reckon you've made a
mistake this time, and missed a chance."
Of course the camel-driver wanted to know what kind of a chance he had
missed, because maybe there was money in it; so he run after the dervish,
and begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him that at last the
dervish gave in, and says:
"Do you see that hill yonder? Well, in that hill is all the treasures
of the earth, and I was looking around for a man with a particular good
kind heart and a noble, generous disposition, because if I could find just
that man, I've got a kind of a salve I could put on his eyes and he could
see the treasures and get them out."
So then the camel-driver was in a sweat; and he cried, and begged, and
took on, and went down on his knees, and said he was just that kind of a
man, and said he could fetch a thousand people that would say he wasn't
ever described so exact before.
"Well, then," says the dervish, "all right. If we load the hundred
camels, can I have half of them?"
The driver was so glad he couldn't hardly hold in, and says:
"Now you're shouting."
So they shook hands on the bargain, and the dervish got out his box and
rubbed the salve on the driver's right eye, and the hill opened and he
went in, and there, sure enough, was piles and piles of gold and jewels
sparkling like all the stars in heaven had fell down.
So him and the dervish laid into it, and they loaded every camel till
he couldn't carry no more; then they said good-bye, and each of them
started off with his fifty. But pretty soon the camel-driver come
a-running and overtook the dervish and says:
"You ain't in society, you know, and you don't really need all you've
got. Won't you be good, and let me have ten of your camels?"
"Well," the dervish says, "I don't know but what you say is reasonable
enough."
So he done it, and they separated and the dervish started off again
with his forty. But pretty soon here comes the camel-driver bawling after
him again, and whines and slobbers around and begs another ten off of him,
saying thirty camel loads of treasures was enough to see a dervish
through, because they live very simple, you know, and don't keep house,
but board around and give their note.
But that warn't the end yet. That ornery hound kept coming and coming
till he had begged back all the camels and had the whole hundred. Then he
was satisfied, and ever so grateful, and said he wouldn't ever forgit the
dervish as long as he lived, and nobody hadn't been so good to him before,
and liberal. So they shook hands good-bye, and separated and started off
again.
But do you know, it warn't ten minutes till the camel-driver was
unsatisfied again-he was the lowdownest reptyle in seven counties-and he
come arunning again. And this time the thing he wanted was to get the
dervish to rub some of the salve on his other eye.
"Why?" said the dervish.
"Oh, you know," says the driver.
"Know what?"
"Well, you can't fool me," says the driver. "You're trying to keep back
something from me, you know it mighty well. You know, I reckon, that if I
had the salve on the other eye I could see a lot more things that's
valuable. Come-please put it on."
The dervish says:
"I wasn't keeping anything back from you. I don't mind telling you what
would happen if I put it on. You'd never see again. You'd be stone-blind
the rest of your days."
But do you know that beat wouldn't believe him. No, he begged and
begged, and whined and cried, till at last the dervish opened his box and
told him to put it on, if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure
enough he was as blind as a bat in a minute.
Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him;
and says:
"Good-bye-a man that's blind hain't got no use for jewelry."
And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and left that man to wander
around poor and miserable and friendless the rest of his days in the
Desert.
Jim said he'd bet it was a lesson to him.
"Yes," Tom says, "and like a considerable many lessons a body gets.
They ain't no account, because the thing don't ever happen the same way
again-and can't. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly and crippled
his back for life, everybody said it would be a lesson to him. What kind
of a lesson? How was he going to use it? He couldn't climb chimblies no
more, and he hadn't no more backs to break."
"All de same, Mars Tom, dey IS sich a thing as learnin' by expe'ence.
De Good Book say de burnt chile shun de fire."
"Well, I ain't denying that a thing's a lesson if it's a thing that can
happen twice just the same way. There's lots of such things, and THEY
educate a person, that's what Uncle Abner always said; but there's forty
MILLION lots of the other kind-the kind that don't happen the same way
twice-and they ain't no real use, they ain't no more instructive than the
small-pox. When you've got it, it ain't no good to find out you ought to
been vaccinated, and it ain't no good to git vaccinated afterward, because
the small-pox don't come but once. But, on the other hand, Uncle Abner
said that the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt
sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person
that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that
was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or
doubtful. But I can tell you, Jim, Uncle Abner was down on them people
that's all the time trying to dig a lesson out of everything that happens,
no matter whether-"
But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed, because you know a
person always feels bad when he is talking uncommon fine and thinks the
other person is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that way. Of
course he oughtn't to go to sleep, because it's shabby; but the finer a
person talks the certainer it is to make you sleep, and so when you come
to look at it it ain't nobody's fault in particular; both of them's to
blame.
Jim begun to snore-soft and blubbery at first, then a long rasp, then a
stronger one, then a half a dozen horrible ones like the last water
sucking down the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more power to
it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in, the way a cow does that is
choking to death; and when the person has got to that point he is at his
level best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block with a
dipperful of loddanum in him, but can't wake himself up although all that
awful noise of his'n ain't but three inches from his own ears. And that is
the curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you rake a match to
light the candle, and that little bit of a noise will fetch him. I wish I
knowed what was the reason of that, but there don't seem to be no way to
find out. Now there was Jim alarming the whole Desert, and yanking the
animals out, for miles and miles around, to see what in the nation was
going on up there; there warn't nobody nor nothing that was as close to
the noise as HE was, and yet he was the only cretur that wasn't disturbed
by it. We yelled at him and whooped at him, it never done no good; but the
first time there come a little wee noise that wasn't of a usual kind it
woke him up. No, sir, I've thought it all over, and so has Tom, and there
ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore.
Jim said he hadn't been asleep; he just shut his eyes so he could
listen better.
Tom said nobody warn't accusing him.
That made him look like he wished he hadn't said anything. And he
wanted to git away from the subject, I reckon, because he begun to abuse
the cameldriver, just the way a person does when he has got catched in
something and wants to take it out of somebody else. He let into the
camel-driver the hardest he knowed how, and I had to agree with him; and
he praised up the dervish the highest he could, and I had to agree with
him there, too. But Tom says:
"I ain't so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful liberal and good
and unselfish, but I don't quite see it. He didn't hunt up another poor
dervish, did he? No, he didn't. If he was so unselfish, why didn't he go
in there himself and take a pocketful of jewels and go along and be
satisfied? No, sir, the person he was hunting for was a man with a hundred
camels. He wanted to get away with all the treasure he could."
"Why, Mars Tom, he was willin' to divide, fair and square; he only
struck for fifty camels."
"Because he knowed how he was going to get all of them by and by."
"Mars Tom, he TOLE de man de truck would make him bline."
"Yes, because he knowed the man's character. It was just the kind of a
man he was hunting for-a man that never believes in anybody's word or
anybody's honorableness, because he ain't got none of his own. I reckon
there's lots of people like that dervish. They swindle, right and left,
but they always make the other person SEEM to swindle himself. They keep
inside of the letter of the law all the time, and there ain't no way to
git hold of them. THEY don't put the salve on-oh, no, that would be sin;
but they know how to fool YOU into putting it on, then it's you that
blinds yourself. I reckon the dervish and the camel-driver was just a
pair-a fine, smart, brainy rascal, and a dull, coarse, ignorant one, but
both of them rascals, just the same."
"Mars Tom, does you reckon dey's any o' dat kind o' salve in de worl'
now?"
"Yes, Uncle Abner says there is. He says they've got it in New York,
and they put it on country people's eyes and show them all the railroads
in the world, and they go in and git them, and then when they rub the
salve on the other eye the other man bids them goodbye and goes off with
their railroads. Here's the treasure-hill now. Lower away!"
We landed, but it warn't as interesting as I thought it was going to
be, because we couldn't find the place where they went in to git the
treasure. Still, it was plenty interesting enough, just to see the mere
hill itself where such a wonderful thing happened. Jim said he wou'dn't
'a' missed it for three dollars, and I felt the same way.
And to me and Jim, as wonderful a thing as any was the way Tom could
come into a strange big country like this and go straight and find a
little hump like that and tell it in a minute from a million other humps
that was almost just like it, and nothing to help him but only his own
learning and his own natural smartness. We talked and talked it over
together, but couldn't make out how he done it. He had the best head on
him I ever see; and all he lacked was age, to make a name for himself
equal to Captain Kidd or George Washington. I bet you it would 'a' crowded
either of THEM to find that hill, with all their gifts, but it warn't
nothing to Tom Sawyer; he went across Sahara and put his finger on it as
easy as you could pick a nigger out of a bunch of angels.
We found a pond of salt water close by and scraped up a raft of salt
around the edges, and loaded up the lion's skin and the tiger's so as they
would keep till Jim could tan them.
Chapter XI. THE SAND-STORM
WE went a-fooling along for a day or two, and then just as the full
moon was touching the ground on the other side of the desert, we see a
string of little black figgers moving across its big silver face. You
could see them as plain as if they was painted on the moon with ink. It
was another caravan. We cooled down our speed and tagged along after it,
just to have company, though it warn't going our way. It was a rattler,
that caravan, and a most bully sight to look at next morning when the sun
come a-streaming across the desert and flung the long shadders of the
camels on the gold sand like a thousand grand-daddy-longlegses marching in
procession. We never went very near it, because we knowed better now than
to act like that and scare people's camels and break up their caravans. It
was the gayest outfit you ever see, for rich clothes and nobby style. Some
of the chiefs rode on dromedaries, the first we ever see, and very tall,
and they go plunging along like they was on stilts, and they rock the man
that is on them pretty violent and churn up his dinner considerable, I bet
you, but they make noble good time, and a camel ain't nowheres with them
for speed.
The caravan camped, during the middle part of the day, and then started
again about the middle of the afternoon. Before long the sun begun to look
very curious. First it kind of turned to brass, and then to copper, and
after that it begun to look like a bloodred ball, and the air got hot and
close, and pretty soon all the sky in the west darkened up and looked
thick and foggy, but fiery and dreadful-like it looks through a piece of
red glass, you know. We looked down and see a big confusion going on in
the caravan, and a rushing every which way like they was scared; and then
they all flopped down flat in the sand and laid there perfectly still.
Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up like an amazing wide
wall, and reached from the Desert up into the sky and hid the sun, and it
was coming like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck us, and
then it come harder, and grains of sand begun to sift against our faces
and sting like fire, and Tom sung out:
"It's a sand-storm-turn your backs to it!"
We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a gale, and the sand
beat against us by the shovelful, and the air was so thick with it we
couldn't see a thing. In five minutes the boat was level full, and we was
setting on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our heads
out and could hardly breathe.
Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous wall go a-sailing off
across the desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out and
looked down, and where the caravan was before there wasn't anything but
just the sand ocean now, and all still and quiet. All them people and
camels was smothered and dead and buried-buried under ten foot of sand, we
reckoned, and Tom allowed it might be years before the wind uncovered
them, and all that time their friends wouldn't ever know what become of
that caravan. Tom said:
"NOW we know what it was that happened to the people we got the swords
and pistols from."
Yes, sir, that was just it. It was as plain as day now. They got buried
in a sand-storm, and the wild animals couldn't get at them, and the wind
never uncovered them again until they was dried to leather and warn't fit
to eat. It seemed to me we had felt as sorry for them poor people as a
person could for anybody, and as mournful, too, but we was mistaken; this
last caravan's death went harder with us, a good deal harder. You see, the
others was total strangers, and we never got to feeling acquainted with
them at all, except, maybe, a little with the man that was watching the
girl, but it was different with this last caravan. We was huvvering around
them a whole night and 'most a whole day, and had got to feeling real
friendly with them, and acquainted. I have found out that there ain't no
surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel
with them. Just so with these. We kind of liked them from the start, and
traveling with them put on the finisher. The longer we traveled with them,
and the more we got used to their ways, the better and better we liked
them, and the gladder and gladder we was that we run across them. We had
come to know some of them so well that we called them by name when we was
talking about them, and soon got so familiar and sociable that we even
dropped the Miss and Mister and just used their plain names without any
handle, and it did not seem unpolite, but just the right thing. Of course,
it wasn't their own names, but names we give them. There was Mr. Elexander
Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson, and Colonel Jacob McDougal and Miss
Harryet McDougal, and Judge Jeremiah Butler and young Bushrod Butler, and
these was big chiefs mostly that wore splendid great turbans and
simmeters, and dressed like the Grand Mogul, and their families. But as
soon as we come to know them good, and like them very much, it warn't
Mister, nor Judge, nor nothing, any more, but only Elleck, and Addy, and
Jake, and Hattie, and Jerry, and Buck, and so on.
And you know the more you join in with people in their joys and their
sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you. Now we warn't
cold and indifferent, the way most travelers is, we was right down
friendly and sociable, and took a chance in everything that was going, and
the caravan could depend on us to be on hand every time, it didn't make no
difference what it was.
When they camped, we camped right over them, ten or twelve hundred feet
up in the air. When they et a meal, we et ourn, and it made it ever so
much homeliker to have their company. When they had a wedding that night,
and Buck and Addy got married, we got ourselves up in the very starchiest
of the professor's duds for the blow-out, and when they danced we jined in
and shook a foot up there.
But it is sorrow and trouble that brings you the nearest, and it was a
funeral that done it with us. It was next morning, just in the still dawn.
We didn't know the diseased, and he warn't in our set, but that never made
no difference; he belonged to the caravan, and that was enough, and there
warn't no more sincerer tears shed over him than the ones we dripped on
him from up there eleven hundred foot on high.
Yes, parting with this caravan was much more bitterer than it was to
part with them others, which was comparative strangers, and been dead so
long, anyway. We had knowed these in their lives, and was fond of them,
too, and now to have death snatch them from right before our faces while
we was looking, and leave us so lonesome and friendless in the middle of
that big desert, it did hurt so, and we wished we mightn't ever make any
more friends on that voyage if we was going to lose them again like that.
We couldn't keep from talking about them, and they was all the time
coming up in our memory, and looking just the way they looked when we was
all alive and happy together. We could see the line marching, and the
shiny spearheads a-winking in the sun; we could see the dromedaries
lumbering along; we could see the wedding and the funeral; and more
oftener than anything else we could see them praying, because they don't
allow nothing to prevent that; whenever the call come, several times a
day, they would stop right there, and stand up and face to the east, and
lift back their heads, and spread out their arms and begin, and four or
five times they would go down on their knees, and then fall forward and
touch their forehead to the ground.
Well, it warn't good to go on talking about them, lovely as they was in
their life, and dear to us in their life and death both, because it didn't
do no good, and made us too down-hearted. Jim allowed he was going to live
as good a life as he could, so he could see them again in a better world;
and Tom kept still and didn't tell him they was only Mohammedans; it
warn't no use to disappoint him, he was feeling bad enough just as it was.
When we woke up next morning we was feeling a little cheerfuller, and
had had a most powerful good sleep, because sand is the comfortablest bed
there is, and I don't see why people that can afford it don't have it
more. And it's terrible good ballast, too; I never see the balloon so
steady before.
Tom allowed we had twenty tons of it, and wondered what we better do
with it; it was good sand, and it didn't seem good sense to throw it away.
Jim says:
"Mars Tom, can't we tote it back home en sell it? How long'll it take?"
"Depends on the way we go."
"Well, sah, she's wuth a quarter of a dollar a load at home, en I
reckon we's got as much as twenty loads, hain't we? How much would dat
be?"
"Five dollars."
"By jings, Mars Tom, le's shove for home right on de spot! Hit's more'n
a dollar en a half apiece, hain't it?"
"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.
Chapter XII. JIM STANDING SIEGE
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.
Chapter XIII. GOING FOR TOM'S PIPE
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.
Популярность: 7, Last-modified: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 15:16:29 GmT