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<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOM SAWYER ABROAD ***</div>
<div class="fig" style="width:55%;">
<img src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="[Illustration]" />
</div>
<h1>Tom Sawyer Abroad</h1>
<h2 class="no-break">By Mark Twain</h2>
<hr />
<h2>Contents</h2>
<table summary="" style="">
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0001">CHAPTER I. TOM SEEKS NEW ADVENTURES</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0002">CHAPTER II. THE BALLOON ASCENSION</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0003">CHAPTER III. TOM EXPLAINS</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0004">CHAPTER IV. STORM</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0005">CHAPTER V. LAND</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0006">CHAPTER VI. IT’S A CARAVAN</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0007">CHAPTER VII. TOM RESPECTS THE FLEA</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0008">CHAPTER VIII. THE DISAPPEARING LAKE</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0009">CHAPTER IX. TOM DISCOURSES ON THE DESERT</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0010">CHAPTER X. THE TREASURE-HILL</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0011">CHAPTER XI. THE SAND-STORM</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0012">CHAPTER XII. JIM STANDING SIEGE</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="#link2HCH0013">CHAPTER XIII. GOING FOR TOM’S PIPE</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr />
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0001"></a>
CHAPTER I.<br/>
TOM SEEKS NEW ADVENTURES</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
For a while he <i>was</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>his</i>
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 <i>his</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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
<i>that</i> 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 <i>he</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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
<i>did</i> 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:
</p>
<p>
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!”
</p>
<p>
“Done!” says the darky.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
It <i>was</i> a powerful good adventure, and Tom Sawyer had to work his
bullet-wound mighty lively to hold his own against it.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Pretty soon he got to worrying and fretting right along day in and day out, and
when I asked him what <i>was</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>you’ve</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
Well, we went out in the woods on the hill, and Tom told us what it was. It was
a crusade.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0025.jpg" width="700" height="479" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“We went out in the woods on the hill, and Tom told us
what it was. It was a crusade.”</p>
</div>
<p>
“What’s a crusade?” I says.
</p>
<p>
He looked scornful, the way he’s always done when he was ashamed of a
person, and says:
</p>
<p>
“Huck Finn, do you mean to tell me you don’t know what a crusade
is?”
</p>
<p>
“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—”
</p>
<p>
“Patent-right!” says he. “I never see such an idiot. Why, a
crusade is a kind of war.”
</p>
<p>
I thought he must be losing his mind. But no, he was in real earnest, and went
right on, perfectly ca’m.
</p>
<p>
“A crusade is a war to recover the Holy Land from the paynim.”
</p>
<p>
“Which Holy Land?”
</p>
<p>
“Why, the Holy Land—there ain’t but one.”
</p>
<p>
“What do we want of it?”
</p>
<p>
“Why, can’t you understand? It’s in the hands of the paynim,
and it’s our duty to take it away from them.”
</p>
<p>
“How did we come to let them git hold of it?”
</p>
<p>
“We didn’t come to let them git hold of it. They always had
it.”
</p>
<p>
“Why, Tom, then it must belong to them, don’t it?”
</p>
<p>
“Why of course it does. Who said it didn’t?”
</p>
<p>
I studied over it, but couldn’t seem to git at the right of it, no way. I
says:
</p>
<p>
“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—”
</p>
<p>
“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
<i>do</i> 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.”
</p>
<p>
“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—”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Religious to go and take the land away from people that owns it?”
</p>
<p>
“Certainly; it’s always been considered so.”
</p>
<p>
Jim he shook his head, and says:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
It made Tom hot, and he says:
</p>
<p>
“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!”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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, <i>dey’d</i> give it,
I know dey would, en den—”
</p>
<p>
“Then what?”
</p>
<p>
“Well, Mars Tom, my idea is like dis. It ain’t no use, we
<i>can’t</i> 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—”
</p>
<p>
“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!”
</p>
<p>
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 <i>how</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Now Tom he got all that notion out of Walter Scott’s book, which he was
always reading. And it <i>was</i> 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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0002"></a>
CHAPTER II.<br/>
THE BALLOON ASCENSION</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>was</i>
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 <i>had</i>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>us</i>. We mustn’t budge
till he was gone, so we could be last ourselves.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0033.jpg" width="600" height="444" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“He said he would sail his balloon around the world”</p>
</div>
<p>
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!
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0037.jpg" width="522" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“And here was night coming on!”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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—
</p>
<p>
“Better what?” I says in a whisper, and feeling sick all over,
because I knowed what he was thinking about.
</p>
<p>
“Better slip back there and tie him, and land the ship,” he says.
</p>
<p>
I says: “No, sir! Don’ you budge, Tom Sawyer.”
</p>
<p>
And Jim—well, Jim was kind o’ gasping, he was so scared. He says:
</p>
<p>
“Oh, Mars Tom, <i>don’t!</i> 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.”
</p>
<p>
Tom whispers and says—“That’s <i>why</i> 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
<i>got</i> to do something, I tell you, and do it before he wakes up, too, or
we mayn’t ever get another chance. Come!”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>was</i>.
</p>
<p>
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 a-blazing up gay and splendid, and then we began
to feel rusty and stretchy, and first we knowed we was all asleep.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0003"></a>
CHAPTER III.<br/>
TOM EXPLAINS</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
There was one thing that kept bothering me, and by and by I says:
</p>
<p>
“Tom, didn’t we start east?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“How fast have we been going?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Well, then, it’s just as I reckoned. The professor lied.”
</p>
<p>
“Why?”
</p>
<p>
“Because if we was going so fast we ought to be past Illinois,
oughtn’t we?”
</p>
<p>
“Certainly.”
</p>
<p>
“Well, we ain’t.”
</p>
<p>
“What’s the reason we ain’t?”
</p>
<p>
“I know by the color. We’re right over Illinois yet. And you can
see for yourself that Indiana ain’t in sight.”
</p>
<p>
“I wonder what’s the matter with you, Huck. You know by the
<i>color?</i>”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, of course I do.”
</p>
<p>
“What’s the color got to do with it?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Indiana <i>pink?</i> Why, what a lie!”
</p>
<p>
“It ain’t no lie; I’ve seen it on the map, and it’s
pink.”
</p>
<p>
You never see a person so aggravated and disgusted. He says:
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
“Tom Sawyer, what’s a map for? Ain’t it to learn you
facts?”
</p>
<p>
“Of course.”
</p>
<p>
“Well, then, how’s it going to do that if it tells lies?
That’s what I want to know.”
</p>
<p>
“Shucks, you muggins! It don’t tell lies.”
</p>
<p>
“It don’t, don’t it?”
</p>
<p>
“No, it don’t.”
</p>
<p>
“All right, then; if it don’t, there ain’t no two States the
same color. You git around <i>that</i> if you can, Tom Sawyer.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“I tell <i>you!</i> dat’s smart, dat’s right down smart.
Ain’t no use, Mars Tom; he got you <i>dis</i> time, sho’!” He
slapped his leg again, and says, “My <i>lan</i>’, but it was smart
one!”
</p>
<p>
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 <i>thinking</i> 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
<i>he</i> 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
<i>hunting</i> 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
<i>that kind of a corn-pone</i>. 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, ’<i>way</i> behind, and done it easy,
too.
</p>
<p>
But Tom he was huffy, and said me and Jim was a couple of ignorant
blatherskites, and then he says:
</p>
<p>
“Suppose there’s a brown calf and a big brown dog, and an artist is
making a picture of them. What is the <i>main</i> 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 <i>both</i> 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.”
</p>
<p>
But I couldn’t see no argument about that, and neither could Jim. Jim
shook his head, and says:
</p>
<p>
“Why, Mars Tom, if you knowed what chuckle-heads dem painters is,
you’d wait a long time before you’d fetch one er <i>dem</i> 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, <i>dey</i> don’t know
nothin’.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“That’s funny! That clock’s near about an hour fast.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“That’s a mighty curious thing,” he says. “I
don’t understand it.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Ger-reat Scott, it’s the <i>longitude!</i>”
</p>
<p>
I says, considerably scared:
</p>
<p>
“Well, what’s been and gone and happened now?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Tom Sawyer, you don’t mean it!”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, did you say dem clocks uz right?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, they’re right.”
</p>
<p>
“Ain’t yo’ watch right, too?”
</p>
<p>
“She’s right for St. Louis, but she’s an hour wrong for
here.”
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, is you tryin’ to let on dat de time ain’t de
<i>same</i> everywheres?”
</p>
<p>
“No, it ain’t the same everywheres, by a long shot.”
</p>
<p>
Jim looked distressed, and says:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
Tom was astonished. He looked Jim over wondering, and didn’t say nothing,
and Jim went on:
</p>
<p>
“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. <i>Well</i>, den! is he gwine to
<i>scriminate</i> ’twixt ’em?”
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
Jim see the p’int. He was stuck. He couldn’t answer. Tom says:
</p>
<p>
“He does discriminate, you see, when he wants to; but this case
<i>here</i> 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.”
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, is dat so? Man done it?”
</p>
<p>
“Certainly.”
</p>
<p>
“Who tole him he could?”
</p>
<p>
“Nobody. He never asked.”
</p>
<p>
Jim studied a minute, and says:
</p>
<p>
“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; <i>dey</i> don’t care what happens. So den dey’s
allays an hour’s diff’unce everywhah, Mars Tom?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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:
</p>
<p>
“<i>Now</i> what’s the matter? What’s the trouble?”
</p>
<p>
Jim could hardly speak, but he says:
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, you ain’t jokin’, en it’s <i>so?</i>”
</p>
<p>
“No, I’m not, and it is so.”
</p>
<p>
Jim shivered again, and says:
</p>
<p>
“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—”
</p>
<p>
All of a sudden we see something, and all jumped up, and forgot everything and
begun to gaze. Tom says:
</p>
<p>
“Ain’t that the—” He catched his breath, then says:
“It <i>is</i>, sure as you live! It’s the ocean!”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Atlantic Ocean—Atlantic. Land, don’t it sound great! And
that’s <i>it</i>—and <i>we</i> are looking at it—we! Why,
it’s just too splendid to believe!”
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0004"></a>
CHAPTER IV.<br/>
STORM</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0049.jpg" width="471" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“The professor said he would keep up this
hundred-mile gait till tomorrow”</p>
</div>
<p>
We said we would be humbly thankful.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“You want to leave me. Don’t try to deny it.”
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0053.jpg" width="489" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“You want to leave me. Don’t try to deny
it.”</p>
</div>
<p>
We didn’t know what to say, so we held in and didn’t say nothing at
all.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Look!”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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
<i>now!</i>”
</p>
<p>
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 <i>ever</i> 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 <i>you</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>just</i> hear it;
and I heard Jim say, “Po’ Mars Tom!”
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
“Come up!” I shouts; “come up, Tom!”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“No, he’s down in the ocean! Come up! Can we help you?”
</p>
<p>
Of course, all this in the dark.
</p>
<p>
“Huck, who is you hollerin’ at?”
</p>
<p>
“I’m hollerin’ at Tom.”
</p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
Tom clumb aboard, and when Jim found it <i>was</i> 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:
</p>
<p>
“What did you wait for, Tom? Why didn’t you come up at
first?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
That was the way with Tom Sawyer—always sound. He warn’t coming up
till he knowed where the professor was.
</p>
<p>
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 coat-sleeve, 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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0057.jpg" width="485" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“The thunder boomed, and the lightning glared, and the
wind screamed in the rigging”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0005"></a>
CHAPTER V.<br/>
LAND</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Well,” I says, “what’s she been doing
since—er—since we had the accident?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 “<i>In the Welkin, approaching England</i>,” and folded it
together and stuck it fast with a red wafer, and directed it, and wrote above
the direction, in big writing, “<i>From Tom Sawyer, the
Erronort</i>,” and said it would stump old Nat Parsons, the postmaster,
when it come along in the mail. I says:
</p>
<p>
“Tom Sawyer, this ain’t no welkin, it’s a balloon.”
</p>
<p>
“Well, now, who <i>said</i> it was a welkin, smarty?”
</p>
<p>
“You’ve wrote it on the letter, anyway.”
</p>
<p>
“What of it? That don’t mean that the balloon’s the
welkin.”
</p>
<p>
“Oh, I thought it did. Well, then, what is a welkin?”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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 <i>any</i> that does.”
</p>
<p>
“Shucks!” I says. “But what does it
<i>mean?</i>—that’s the p’int.”
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
“Course they don’t.”
</p>
<p>
“But they put them <i>on</i>, don’t they?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“All right, then; that letter I wrote is a shirt, and the welkin’s
the ruffle on it.”
</p>
<p>
I judged that that would gravel Jim, and it did.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Oh <i>do</i> shut up, and wait till something’s started that you
know something about.”
</p>
<p>
“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—”
</p>
<p>
“I tell you, this hasn’t got anything to do with shirts. I
only—”
</p>
<p>
“Why, Mars Tom, you said yo’self dat a letter—”
</p>
<p>
“Do you want to drive me crazy? Keep still. I only used it as a
metaphor.”
</p>
<p>
That word kinder bricked us up for a minute. Then Jim says—rather timid,
because he see Tom was getting pretty tetchy:
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, what is a metaphor?”
</p>
<p>
“A metaphor’s a—well, it’s a—a—a
metaphor’s an illustration.” He see <i>that</i> didn’t git
home, so he tried again. “When I say birds of a feather flocks together,
it’s a metaphorical way of saying—”
</p>
<p>
“But dey <i>don’t!</i>, 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—”
</p>
<p>
“Oh, give us a rest! You can’t get the simplest little thing
through your thick skull. Now don’t bother me any more.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>on</i>
moderating, and in a precious little while it was ’most too moderate. We
was close down now, and just blistering!
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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!”
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0065.jpg" width="600" height="360" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“Run! Run fo’ yo’ life!”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0069.jpg" width="487" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“And there was the lion, a-ripping around under me”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“Don’t go so fast,” I shouted. “It makes my head
swim.”
</p>
<p>
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 <i>is</i>
uncomfortable to see things sliding and gliding under you like that, and not a
sound.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>their</i> side of the matter.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0006"></a>
CHAPTER VI.<br/>
IT’S A CARAVAN</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are. We’re in the
Great Sahara, as sure as guns!”
</p>
<p>
He was so excited he couldn’t hold still; but I wasn’t. I says:
</p>
<p>
“Well, then, where’s the Great Sahara? In England or in
Scotland?”
</p>
<p>
“’Tain’t in either; it’s in Africa.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
Jim was gazing down with the glass. He shook his head and says:
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, I reckon dey’s a mistake som’er’s,
hain’t seen no niggers yit.”
</p>
<p>
“That’s nothing; they don’t live in the desert. What is that,
’way off yonder? Gimme a glass.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“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—”
</p>
<p>
“Oh, shucks, Huck Finn, I never see such a lunkhead as you. Did you
s’pose there’s meridians of longitude on the <i>earth?</i>”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Of course they’re on the map, but that’s nothing; there
ain’t any on the <i>ground</i>.”
</p>
<p>
“Tom, do you know that to be so?”
</p>
<p>
“Certainly I do.”
</p>
<p>
“Well, then, that map’s a liar again. I never see such a liar as
that map.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Camels!—Camels!”
</p>
<p>
So I grabbed a glass and Jim, too, and took a look, but I was disappointed, and
says:
</p>
<p>
“Camels your granny; they’re spiders.”
</p>
<p>
“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 <i>with</i>. 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.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“All right,” he says, and give the command:
</p>
<p>
“Lower away.”
</p>
<p>
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 weather—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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0073.jpg" width="432" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“We swooped down, now, all of a sudden”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0077.jpg" width="476" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“The last man to go snatched up a child, and carried
it off in front of him on his horse”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0081.jpg" width="575" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“We come a-whizzing down, and made a swoop, and
knocked him out of the saddle, child and all”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0007"></a>
CHAPTER VII.<br/>
TOM RESPECTS THE FLEA</h2>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“A flea? Why, Mars Tom, in de fust place he ain’t a bird, strickly
speakin’—”
</p>
<p>
“He ain’t a bird, eh? Well, then, what is he?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“I bet he ain’t, but let it go. What’s your second
place?”
</p>
<p>
“Well, in de second place, birds is creturs dat goes a long ways, but a
flea don’t.”
</p>
<p>
“He don’t, don’t he? Come, now, what <i>is</i> a long
distance, if you know?”
</p>
<p>
“Why, it’s miles, and lots of ’em—anybody knows
dat.”
</p>
<p>
“Can’t a man walk miles?”
</p>
<p>
“Yassir, he kin.”
</p>
<p>
“As many as a railroad?”
</p>
<p>
“Yassir, if you give him time.”
</p>
<p>
“Can’t a flea?”
</p>
<p>
“Well—I s’pose so—ef you gives him heaps of
time.”
</p>
<p>
“Now you begin to see, don’t you, that <i>distance</i> ain’t
the thing to judge by, at all; it’s the time it takes to go the distance
<i>in</i> that <i>counts</i>, ain’t it?”
</p>
<p>
“Well, hit do look sorter so, but I wouldn’t ’a’
b’lieved it, Mars Tom.”
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0085.jpg" width="457" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“And where’s your railroad, alongside of a
flea?”</p>
</div>
<p>
“It’s a matter of <i>proportion</i>, 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 <i>first</i>-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 <i>now?</i>—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.”
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0089.jpg" width="600" height="362" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“Where’s your man now?”</p>
</div>
<p>
Jim was a good deal astonished, and so was I. Jim said:
</p>
<p>
“Is dem figgers jist edjackly true, en no jokin’ en no lies, Mars
Tom?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, they are; they’re perfectly true.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0093.jpg" width="600" height="374" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“That flea would be President of the United States,
and you couldn’t prevent it”</p>
</div>
<p>
“My lan’, Mars Tom, I never knowed dey was so much <i>to</i> de
beas’. No, sir, I never had no idea of it, and dat’s de
fac’.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom!”
</p>
<p>
“It’s so; I ain’t joking.”
</p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Have you run across a stray camel to-day?”
</p>
<p>
And the man says:
</p>
<p>
“Was he blind in his left eye?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“Had he lost an upper front tooth?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“Was his off hind leg lame?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“Was he loaded with millet-seed on one side and honey on the
other?”
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
“I hain’t seen him at all,” the man says.
</p>
<p>
“Hain’t seen him at all? How can you describe him so close,
then?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
Jim says:
</p>
<p>
“Go on, Mars Tom, hit’s a mighty good tale, and powerful
interestin’.”
</p>
<p>
“That’s all,” Tom says.
</p>
<p>
“<i>All?</i>” says Jim, astonished. “What ’come
o’ de camel?”
</p>
<p>
“I don’t know.”
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, don’t de tale say?”
</p>
<p>
“No.”
</p>
<p>
Jim puzzled a minute, then he says:
</p>
<p>
“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 <i>sense</i> in a tale dat acts like dat.
Hain’t you got no <i>idea</i> whether de man got de camel back er
not?”
</p>
<p>
“No, I haven’t.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“What do <i>you</i> think of the tale?”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Some people can see, and some can’t—just as that man said.
Let alone a camel, if a cyclone had gone by, <i>you</i> duffers wouldn’t
’a’ noticed the track.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0008"></a>
CHAPTER VIII.<br/>
THE DISAPPEARING LAKE</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Some of the men had rusty guns by them, some had swords on and had shawl belts
with long, silver-mounted 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0101.jpg" width="500" height="411" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“We opened the box, and it had gems and jewels in it”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 hundred-mile 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!
</p>
<p>
Tom’s eyes took a spread, and he says:
</p>
<p>
“Boys, it was a <i>my</i>ridge!” Said it like he was glad. I
didn’t see nothing to be glad about. I says:
</p>
<p>
“Maybe. I don’t care nothing about its name, the thing I want to
know is, what’s become of it?”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“What’s <i>become</i> of it? Why, you see yourself it’s
gone.”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, I know; but where’s it gone <i>to?</i>”
</p>
<p>
He looked me over and says:
</p>
<p>
“Well, now, Huck Finn, where <i>would</i> it go to! Don’t you know
what a myridge is?”
</p>
<p>
“No, I don’t. What is it?”
</p>
<p>
“It ain’t anything but imagination. There ain’t anything
<i>to</i> it.”
</p>
<p>
It warmed me up a little to hear him talk like that, and I says:
</p>
<p>
“What’s the use you talking that kind of stuff, Tom Sawyer?
Didn’t I see the lake?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes—you think you did.”
</p>
<p>
“I don’t think nothing about it, I <i>did</i> see it.”
</p>
<p>
“I tell you you <i>didn’t</i> see it either—because it
warn’t there to see.”
</p>
<p>
It astonished Jim to hear him talk so, and he broke in and says, kind of
pleading and distressed:
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, <i>please</i> 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
<i>wuz</i> dah—I seen it jis’ as plain as I sees you en Huck dis
minute.”
</p>
<p>
I says:
</p>
<p>
“Why, he seen it himself! He was the very one that seen it first.
<i>Now</i>, then!”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, Mars Tom, hit’s so—you can’t deny it. We all seen
it, en dat <i>prove</i> it was dah.”
</p>
<p>
“Proves it! How does it prove it?”
</p>
<p>
“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
<i>so</i>. Dey ain’t no gittin’ aroun’ dat, en you knows it,
Mars Tom.”
</p>
<p>
“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 <i>done</i> it?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
Tom turned on me, then, and says:
</p>
<p>
“What do <i>you</i> say—is the sun standing still?”
</p>
<p>
“Tom Sawyer, what’s the use to ask such a jackass question? Anybody
that ain’t blind can see it don’t stand still.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
It warn’t fair play, and I let him know it. I says:
</p>
<p>
“Throwin’ mud ain’t arguin’, Tom Sawyer.”
</p>
<p>
“Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness gracious, dah’s de lake
agi’n!” yelled Jim, just then. “<i>Now</i>, Mars Tom, what
you gwine to say?”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“I reckon you’re satisfied now, Tom Sawyer.”
</p>
<p>
But he says, perfectly ca’m:
</p>
<p>
“Yes, satisfied there ain’t no lake there.”
</p>
<p>
Jim says:
</p>
<p>
“<i>Don’t!</i> 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
<i>so</i> thirsty.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
I says:
</p>
<p>
“Jim, don’t you take your eye off of it, and I won’t,
either.”
</p>
<p>
“’Deed I won’t; en bless you, honey, I couldn’t ef I
wanted to.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, hit’s a <i>ghos</i>’, dat’s what it is, en I
hopes to goodness we ain’t gwine to see it no mo’. Dey’s
<i>been</i> 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.”
</p>
<p>
“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!”
</p>
<p>
He grabbed it and begun to gaze off to the right.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Take the glass, one of you, and see what that is, away ahead of the
birds.”
</p>
<p>
Jim got the first glimpse, and slumped down on the locker sick. He was most
crying, and says:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“<i>Now</i> get up and look, you sapheads.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Jim <i>did</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“Lions a-comin’!—lions! Quick, Mars Tom! Jump for yo’
life, Huck!”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>his</i> head, too; for he knowed I was too scared to
climb, and did he want to dump me among the tigers and things?
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Leggo, and drop!”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0109.jpg" width="477" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“And all this time the lions and tigers was sorting
out the clothes”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0009"></a>
CHAPTER IX.<br/>
TOM DISCOURSES ON THE DESERT</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0006.jpg" width="436" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“We catched a lot of the nicest fish you ever see.”</p>
</div>
<p>
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 feather-duster. 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>reckoning</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Jim was thinking to himself, and at last he says:
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, we’s mos’ to de end er de Desert now, I
speck.”
</p>
<p>
“Why?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Shucks, there’s plenty sand, you needn’t worry.”
</p>
<p>
“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 <i>was’e</i> 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’.”
</p>
<p>
“Oh, go ’long! we ain’t much more than fairly <i>started</i>
across this Desert yet. The United States is a pretty big country, ain’t
it? Ain’t it, Huck?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes,” I says, “there ain’t no bigger one, I
don’t reckon.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
I say:
</p>
<p>
“Good land! have you got the documents for that, Tom Sawyer?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, I reckon.”
</p>
<p>
“Hain’t it so, Mars Tom?”
</p>
<p>
“I guess so. Go on.”
</p>
<p>
“Ef a thing ain’t no good, it’s made in vain, ain’t
it?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“<i>Now</i>, den! Do de Lord make anything in vain? You answer me
dat.”
</p>
<p>
“Well—no, He don’t.”
</p>
<p>
“Den how come He make a desert?”
</p>
<p>
“Well, go on. How <i>did</i> He come to make it?”
</p>
<p>
“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
<i>happen</i>’.”
</p>
<p>
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 <i>theories</i>, 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 <i>to</i> find out. And he says:
</p>
<p>
“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 star-stuff, and none
left over? How does it come there ain’t no sand-pile up there?”
</p>
<p>
But Jim was fixed for him and says:
</p>
<p>
“What’s de Milky Way?—dat’s what I want to know.
What’s de Milky Way? Answer me dat!”
</p>
<p>
In my opinion it was just a sockdologer. It’s only an opinion, it’s
only <i>my</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Why, I’ve heard talk about this Desert plenty of times, but I
never knowed before how important she was.”
</p>
<p>
Then Tom says:
</p>
<p>
“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 <i>size</i>. 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.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
So we begun to gaze, and he begun to tell about it out of the Arabian Nights.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0010"></a>
CHAPTER X.<br/>
THE TREASURE-HILL</h2>
<p>
Tom said it happened like this.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Don’t you own these camels?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, they’re mine.”
</p>
<p>
“Are you in debt?”
</p>
<p>
“Who—me? No.”
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then the dervish says:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“All right, if you want to take the risk; but I reckon you’ve made
a mistake this time, and missed a chance.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0121.jpg" width="388" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“The camel-driver in the treasure-cave”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“Well, then,” says the dervish, “all right. If we load the
hundred camels, can I have half of them?”
</p>
<p>
The driver was so glad he couldn’t hardly hold in, and says:
</p>
<p>
“Now you’re shouting.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
“Well,” the dervish says, “I don’t know but what you
say is reasonable enough.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 a-running again. And this time the thing he wanted
was to get the dervish to rub some of the salve on his other eye.
</p>
<p>
“Why?” said the dervish.
</p>
<p>
“Oh, you know,” says the driver.
</p>
<p>
“Know what?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
The dervish says:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him; and
says:
</p>
<p>
“Good-bye—a man that’s blind hain’t got no use for
jewelry.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Jim said he’d bet it was a lesson to him.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“All de same, Mars Tom, dey <i>is</i> sich a thing as learnin’ by
expe’ence. De Good Book say de burnt chile shun de fire.”
</p>
<p>
“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 <i>they</i> educate a person, that’s what Uncle Abner always
said; but there’s forty <i>million</i> 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—”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>he</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
Jim said he hadn’t been asleep; he just shut his eyes so he could listen
better.
</p>
<p>
Tom said nobody warn’t accusing him.
</p>
<p>
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
camel-driver, 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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Why, Mars Tom, he was willin’ to divide, fair and square; he only
struck for fifty camels.”
</p>
<p>
“Because he knowed how he was going to get all of them by and by.”
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, he <i>tole</i> de man de truck would make him bline.”
</p>
<p>
“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. <i>They</i> don’t put the salve on—oh,
no, that would be sin; but they know how to fool <i>you</i> 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.”
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, does you reckon dey’s any o’ dat kind o’
salve in de worl’ now?”
</p>
<p>
“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!”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>them</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0011"></a>
CHAPTER XI.<br/>
THE SAND-STORM</h2>
<p>
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-long-legses 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.
</p>
<p>
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 blood-red 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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“It’s a sand-storm—turn your backs to it!”
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0131.jpg" width="458" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“In the sand-storm”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“<i>Now</i> we know what it was that happened to the people we got the
swords and pistols from.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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
home-liker 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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0135.jpg" width="431" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“When they danced we joined in and shook a foot up
there”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0139.jpg" width="600" height="494" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“The wedding procession”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, can’t we tote it back home en sell it? How long’ll
it take?”
</p>
<p>
“Depends on the way we go.”
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
“Five dollars.”
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“Well, ef dat ain’t makin’ money de easiest ever <i>I</i>
struck! She jes’ rained in—never cos’ us a lick o’
work. Le’s mosey right along, Mars Tom.”
</p>
<p>
But Tom was thinking and ciphering away so busy and excited he never heard him.
Pretty soon he says:
</p>
<p>
“Five dollars—sho! Look here, this sand’s
worth—worth—why, it’s worth no end of money.”
</p>
<p>
“How is dat, Mars Tom? Go on, honey, go on!”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
Me and Jim went all to pieces with joy, and begun to shout whoopjamboreehoo,
and Tom says:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“My goodness,” I says, “we’ll be as rich as Creosote,
won’t we, Tom?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, how much is we gwyne to be worth?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out considerable, and he shook his
head and says:
</p>
<p>
“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’.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Boys, it won’t work; we got to give it up.”
</p>
<p>
“Why, Tom?”
</p>
<p>
“On account of the duties.”
</p>
<p>
I couldn’t make nothing out of that, neither could Jim. I says:
</p>
<p>
“What <i>is</i> our duty, Tom? Because if we can’t git around it,
why can’t we just <i>do</i> it? People often has to.”
</p>
<p>
But he says:
</p>
<p>
“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 custom-house 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 <i>can’t</i> go <i>that</i>
road.”
</p>
<p>
“Why, Tom,” I says, “we can sail right over their old
frontiers; how are <i>they</i> going to stop us?”
</p>
<p>
He looked sorrowful at me, and says, very grave:
</p>
<p>
“Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest?”
</p>
<p>
I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said nothing, and he went on:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Why?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“There ain’t no sense in that, Tom Sawyer.”
</p>
<p>
“Who said there <i>was?</i> 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.”
</p>
<p>
“All right, consider me crying about it, and sorry. Go on.”
</p>
<p>
Jim says:
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, do dey jam dat duty onto everything we can’t raise in
America, en don’t make no ’stinction ’twix’
anything?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, that’s what they do.”
</p>
<p>
“Mars Tom, ain’t de blessin’ o’ de Lord de mos’
valuable thing dey is?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, it is.”
</p>
<p>
“Don’t de preacher stan’ up in de pulpit en call it down on
de people?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“Whah do it come from?”
</p>
<p>
“From heaven.”
</p>
<p>
“Yassir! you’s jes’ right, ’deed you is, honey—it
come from heaven, en dat’s a foreign country. <i>Now</i>, den! do dey put
a tax on dat blessin’?”
</p>
<p>
“No, they don’t.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
Tom Sawyer was stumped; he see Jim had got him where he couldn’t budge.
He tried to wiggle out by saying they had <i>forgot</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 three-fifths. Jim he didn’t
quite like that arrangement. He says:
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
“Well, I didn’t think so, Jim, but you try your hand at fixing it,
and let’s see.”
</p>
<p>
So Jim reckoned it wouldn’t be no more than fair if me and Tom done a
<i>tenth</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0012"></a>
CHAPTER XII.<br/>
JIM STANDING SIEGE</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“It’s the pyramids of Egypt.”
</p>
<p>
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 <i>real</i>, ’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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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
<i>again</i>.
</p>
<p>
It was just so with me, and the same with Jim.
</p>
<p>
And when Jim got so he could believe it <i>was</i> 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:
</p>
<p>
“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!”
</p>
<p>
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 <i>his</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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:
</p>
<p>
“Oh, for de lan’s sake, set her back, Mars Tom, here’s de
biggest giant outen de ’Rabian Nights a-comin’ for us!” and
he went over backwards in the boat.
</p>
<p>
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 boat-hook 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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“He ain’t alive, you fools; it’s the Sphinx!”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0151.jpg" width="331" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“Jim standing a siege”</p>
</div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0155.jpg" width="600" height="423" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“Rescue of Jim”</p>
</div>
<p>
We clapped on the power, and went for them a-biling. 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, <i>he</i> 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 <i>git</i>, 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:
</p>
<p>
“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 <i>that</i>
easy.”
</p>
<p>
Jim says:
</p>
<p>
“What’s an indemnity, Mars Tom?”
</p>
<p>
“It’s cash, that’s what it is.”
</p>
<p>
“Who gits it, Mars Tom?”
</p>
<p>
“Why, <i>we</i> do.”
</p>
<p>
“En who gits de apology?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“How much money will it be, Mars Tom?”
</p>
<p>
“Well, in an aggravated case like this one, it will be at least three
dollars apiece, and I don’t know but more.”
</p>
<p>
“Well, den, we’ll take de money, Mars Tom, blame de ’pology.
Hain’t dat yo’ notion, too? En hain’t it yourn, Huck?”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“Yes; the little ones does.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>do</i> 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:
</p>
<p>
“Come, out with it. What do you think?”
</p>
<p>
I says:
</p>
<p>
“Tom Sawyer, <i>you</i> don’t believe that, yourself.”
</p>
<p>
“What’s the reason I don’t? What’s to hender me?”
</p>
<p>
“There’s one thing to hender you: it couldn’t happen,
that’s all.”
</p>
<p>
“What’s the reason it couldn’t happen?”
</p>
<p>
“You tell me the reason it <i>could</i> happen.”
</p>
<p>
“This balloon is a good enough reason it could happen, I should
reckon.”
</p>
<p>
“<i>Why</i> is it?”
</p>
<p>
“<i>Why</i> is it? I never saw such an idiot. Ain’t this balloon
and the bronze horse the same thing under different names?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“By Jackson, Huck’s got him ag’in! Dey ain’t no
wigglin’ outer dat!”
</p>
<p>
“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 <i>form</i>
that’s got anything to do with their being similar or unsimilar,
it’s the <i>principle</i> involved; and the principle is the same in
both. Don’t you see, now?”
</p>
<p>
I turned it over in my mind, and says:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“Very well. Don’t we fly high or fly low, just as we please?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“Don’t we steer whichever way we want to?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“And don’t we land when and where we please?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes.”
</p>
<p>
“How do we move the balloon and steer it?”
</p>
<p>
“By touching the buttons.”
</p>
<p>
“<i>Now</i> 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.”
</p>
<p>
He felt so happy he begun to whistle. But me and Jim was silent, so he broke
off surprised, and says:
</p>
<p>
“Looky here, Huck Finn, don’t you see it <i>yet?</i>”
</p>
<p>
I says:
</p>
<p>
“Tom Sawyer, I want to ask you some questions.”
</p>
<p>
“Go ahead,” he says, and I see Jim chirk up to listen.
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
“No, that ain’t any matter, as long as they’ve both got the
same power.”
</p>
<p>
“All right, then. What is the power that’s in a candle and in a
match?”
</p>
<p>
“It’s the fire.”
</p>
<p>
“It’s the same in both, then?”
</p>
<p>
“Yes, just the same in both.”
</p>
<p>
“All right. Suppose I set fire to a carpenter shop with a match, what
will happen to that carpenter shop?”
</p>
<p>
“She’ll burn up.”
</p>
<p>
“And suppose I set fire to this pyramid with a candle—will she burn
up?”
</p>
<p>
“Of course she won’t.”
</p>
<p>
“All right. Now the fire’s the same, both times. <i>Why</i> does
the shop burn, and the pyramid don’t?”
</p>
<p>
“Because the pyramid <i>can’t</i> burn.”
</p>
<p>
“Aha! and <i>a horse can’t fly!</i>”
</p>
<p>
“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—”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="link2HCH0013"></a>
CHAPTER XIII.<br/>
GOING FOR TOM’S PIPE:</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>does</i> he do it? Is
it knowledge, or is it instink?
</p>
<p>
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 <i>place</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>what</i>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
That was a fact, and it stumped Tom for a minute. Then he said:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0167.jpg" width="700" height="496" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“Map of the trip made by Tom Sawyer Erronott 1850”</p>
</div>
<p>
“Ef it’s dat easy, Mars Tom, I reckon we kin do it—yassir, I
knows we kin.”
</p>
<p>
The guide was sure of it, too, and thought that he could learn to stand his
watch in a little while.
</p>
<p>
“Jim can learn you the whole thing in a half an hour,” Tom said.
“This balloon’s as easy to manage as a canoe.”
</p>
<p>
Tom got out the chart and marked out the course and measured it, and says:
</p>
<p>
“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 two-hundred-mile
gales to be found, any time you want to hunt for them.”
</p>
<p>
“We’ll hunt for them, sir.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
Then he ciphered on the time, and says—
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
“It’s 10 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.”
</p>
<p>
Tom he read the piece of paper to us. He had wrote on it:
</p>
<p class="letter">
“T<small>HURSDAY</small> A<small>FTERNOON</small>. 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.”*
</p>
<p class="right">
“T<small>OM</small> S<small>AWYER THE</small>
E<small>RRONORT</small>”
</p>
<p class="footnote">
* This misplacing of the Ark is probably Huck’s error, not
Tom’s.—M.T.
</p>
<p>
“That’ll make her eyes bulge out and the tears come,” he
says. Then he says:
</p>
<p>
“Stand by! One—two—three—away you go!”
</p>
<p>
And away she <i>did</i> go! Why, she seemed to whiz out of sight in a second.
</p>
<p>
Then we found a most comfortable cave that looked out over the whole big plain,
and there we camped to wait for the pipe.
</p>
<p class="p2">
The balloon come back 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:
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
So then we shoved for home, and not feeling very gay, neither.
</p>
<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
<img src="images/0171.jpg" width="600" height="411" alt="[Illustration]" />
<p class="caption">“Homeward bound”</p>
</div>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOM SAWYER ABROAD ***</div>
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