 9 Tom Discourses on the Desert Still, we thought we would drop down there a minute, but on another errand. Most of the professor's cargo of food was put up in cans, in the new way that somebody had just invented. The rest was fresh. When you fetch Missouri beef steak to the great Sahara, you want to be particular and stay up in the coolish weather, so we reckoned we would drop down into the lion market and see how we could make out there. We hauled in the ladder and dropped down till we was just above the reach of the animals, then we let down a rope with a slipknot 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 a revolver, or they would have took a hand in the proceedings and helped. We carved off a supply from both, and saved the skins, and hoeved the rest overboard. Then we baited some of the professor's hooks with the fresh meat, and went to fishing. We stood over the lake just a convenient distance above the water, and catched a lot of the nicest fish you ever see. It was a most amazing good supper we had—lion steak, tiger steak, fried fish, and hot corn-pone. I don't want nothing better than that. We had some fruit to finish off with. We got it out of the top of a monstrous tall tree. It was a very slim tree that hadn't a branch on it from the bottom plum to the top, and there it bursted out like a feather duster. It was a palm tree, of course. Anybody knows a palm tree the minute he sees it, by the pictures. We went for coconuts in this one, but there weren'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 had them. They'd done it, so we'd done it too. And they was most amazing good. By this time monstrous big birds began to come and settle on the dead animals. They was plucky critters. They would tackle one end of a lion that was being gnawed at the other end by another lion. If the lion drove the bird away it didn't do no good. He was back again the minute the lion was busy. The big birds come out of every part of the sky. 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 miles a patch of dead lions couldn't look any bigger than a person's fingernail, and he couldn't imagine how the birds could notice such a little thing so far off. It was strange and unnatural to see a lion eat lion, and we thought maybe they weren'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'd knowed which was him, but reckoned he would eat his brother-in-law if he was uncommon hungry, and eat his mother-in-law any time. But reckoning don't settle nothing. You can reckon till the cows come home, but that don't fetch you to no decision, so we give it up and let it drop. Generally it was very still in the desert nights, but this time there was music. A lot of other animals come to dinner. Sneaking yelpers that Tom allowed was jackals, and roached-backed ones that he said was hyenas, and all the whole biling of them kept up a racket all the time. They made a picture in the moonlight that was more different than any picture I ever see. We had a line out, and made fast to the top of a tree, and didn't stand no watch, but all turned in and slept. But I was up two or three times to look down at the animals and hear the music. It was like having a front seat at a menagerie for nothing, which I hadn't ever had before, and so it seemed foolish to sleep and not make the most of it. I mightn't ever have such a chance again. We went a-fishing again in the early dawn, and then lazied around all day in the deep shade on an island, taking turn about to watch and see that none of the animals come as snooping around there after aeronorts for dinner. We was going to leave the next day, but couldn't. It was too lovely. The day after, when we rose up toward the sky and sailed off eastward, we looked back and watched that place till there weren't nothing but just a speck in the desert, and I tell you it was like saying good-bye to a friend that you ain't ever going to see any more. Jim was thinking to himself, and at last he says, Mars-Tom, we's most to the end of the desert now, I speck. Why? Well, it's that reason we is. You know how long we's been a-skimming over it. Must be most out of sand. It's a wonder to me that it's hilt out as long as it has. Shucks, there's plenty sand. You needn't worry. Oh, I ain't a-wurring, Mars-Tom, only wondering, that's all. The Lord's got plenty of sand. I ain't doubting that. But, never mind. He ain't going to waste it just on that account, and I allows that this desert's plenty big enough now, just the way she is, and you can't spread her out no more, doubt wasting sand. Oh, go long, we ain't much more than fairly started across this desert yet. The United States is a pretty big country, ain't it? Ain't it, Huck? Yes, I says. There ain't no bigger one I don't reckon. Well, he says, this desert is about the shape of the United States, and if you was to lay it down on top of the United States, it would cover the land of the free out-of-sight like a blanket. There'd be a little corner sticking out, up at Maine, and away up Northwest, and Florida sticking out like a turtle's tail, and that's all. We've took California away from the Mexicans two or three years ago, so that part of the Pacific coast is ours now, and if you laid the great Sahara down with her edge on the Pacific, she would cover the United States and stick out past New York six hundred miles into the Atlantic Ocean. I say, good land! Have you got the documents for that, Tom Sawyer? Yes, and they're right here, and I've been studying them. You can look for yourself. From New York to the Pacific is two thousand six hundred miles. From one end of the great desert to the other is three thousand two hundred. The United States contains three million six hundred thousand square miles. The desert contains four million one hundred and sixty two thousand. With the desert's bulk, you could cover up every last inch of the United States, and in under where the edge is 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 a site under the great Sahara, and you would still have two thousand square miles of sand left. Well, I says, it clean beats me. Why, Tom, it shows that the Lord took as much pains making this desert as making the United States and all them other countries. Jim says, look, that don't stand a reason. I reckon this desert won't mate at all. Now, you take and look at it like this. You look at it and see if I's right. What's the desert good for? Tink good for nothing. There ain't no way to make it pay. Ain't that so, Huck? Yes, I reckon. Ain't it so, Mars Tom? I guess so. Go on. If a thing ain't no good, it's made in vain, ain't it? Yes. Now then, do the Lord make anything in vain? You answer me that. Well, no, he don't. Then how come he make a desert? Well, go on. How did he come to make it? Mars Tom, I believe it is just like when you'd build in a house. There's always a lot of truck and rubbish left over. What does you do with it? Don't you take and chide it off and dump it into an old vacant back lot? Of course. Now then, it's my opinion. It was just like that. That the great Sahara weren't made at all. She just happened. I said it was a real good argument and I believed it was the best one Jim ever made. Tom, he said the same, but said the trouble about arguments is, they ain't nothing but theories, after all, and theories don't prove nothing. They only give you a place to rest on, Spell, when you are tuckered out, budding around and around, trying to find out something there ain't no way to find out. And he says, There's another trouble about theories. There's always a hole in them somewheres. Sure, if you look close enough. It's just so with this one of Jim's. Look what billions and billions of stars there is. How does it come that there was just exactly enough star stuff and none left over? How does it come there ain't no sandpile up there? But Jim was fixed for him and says, What's the Milky Way? That's what I want to know. What's the Milky Way? Answer me that. In my opinion, it was just a sock-dollager. It's only an opinion, it's only my opinion, and others may think it's different, but I said it then and I stand to it now. It was a sock-dollager. And more over, 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 cag of nails. All he said was, as for people like me and Jim, he'd just as soon have intellectual intercourse with a catfish. But anybody can say that. And I notice they always do when somebody has fetched them a lifter. Tom Sawyer was tired of that end of the subject. So we got back to talking about the size of the desert again, and the more we compared it with this and that and the other thing, the more nobler and bigger and grander it got to look right along. And so, hunting amongst the figures, Tom found, by and by, that it was just the same size as the Empire of China. Then he showed us the spread the Empire of China made on the map and the room she took up in the world. Well, it was wonderful to think of. And I says, why, I've heard talk about this desert plenty of times, but I never knowed before how important she was. And Tom says, important. Sahara important. That's just the way with some people. If a thing's big, it's important. That's all the sense they've got. All they can see is size. Why, look at England. It's the most important country in the world. And yet you could put it in China's vest pocket and not only that, but you'd have the Dickens' 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 than this world and Rhode Island is, and hasn't got half as much in it that's worth saving. Away off now we see a little hill standing up just on the edge of the world. Tom broke off his talk and reached for a glass very much excited and took a look and says, That's it. It's the one I've been looking for, sure. If I'm right, it's the one that Dervish took the man into and showed him all the treasures. So we begun to gaze, and he begun to tell about it out of the Arabian Nights. Mark Twain Chapter 10 The Treasure Hill Tom said it happened like this. A Dervish was stumping it along through the desert on foot, one blazing hot day, and he had come a thousand miles and was pretty poor and hungry and ornery and tired, and along about where we are now he ran across a camel-driver with a hundred camels and asked him for some alms. But the camel-driver, he asked to be excused. The Dervish says, Don't you own these camels? Yes, they're mine. Are you in debt? Who, me? No. Well, a man that owns a hundred camels and ain't in debt is rich, and not only rich, but very rich ain't it so? The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then the Dervish says, God has made you rich and he has made me poor. He has his reasons, and they are wise, blessed to be his name. But he has will that his rich shall help his poor, and you have turned away from me your brother in my need, and he will remember this, and you will lose by it. That made the camel-driver feel shaky. But all the same he was born hoggish after money and didn't like to let go a cent. So he began to whine and explain, and said times was hard, and although he had took a full freight down to Belsora and got a fat rate for it, he couldn't get no return freight, so he weren't making no great things out of his trip. So the Dervish starts along again and says, All right, if you want to take the risk, but I reckon you've made a mistake this time and missed the chance. Of course the camel-driver wanted to know what kind of a chance he had missed, because maybe there was money in it. So he run after the Dervish and begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him that at last the Dervish gave in and says, Do you see that hill yonder? Well, in that hill is all the treasures of the earth, and I was looking around for a man with a particular good kind heart and a noble generous disposition, because if I could find just that man, I've got a kind of a salve I could put on his eyes, and he could see the treasures and get them out. So then the camel-driver was in a sweat and he cried and begged and took on and went down on his knees and said he was just that kind of a man and said he could fetch a thousand people that would say he wasn't ever described so exact before. Well then, says the Dervish, all right, if we load the hundred camels, can I have half of them? The driver was so glad he couldn't hardly hold in and says, Now you're shouting! So they shook hands on the bargain and the Dervish got out his box and rubbed the salve on the driver's right eye and the hill opened and he went in and there sure enough was piles and piles of gold and jewels sparkling like all the stars in heaven had fell down. So him and the Dervish laid into it and they loaded every camel till he couldn't carry no more. Then they said good-bye and each of them started off with his fifty. But pretty soon the camel-driver come a-running and overtook the Dervish and says, You ain't in society, you know, and you don't really need all you've got. Won't you be good and let me have ten of your camels? Well, the Dervish says, I don't know but what you say is reasonable enough. So he done it. And they separated and the Dervish started off again with his forty. But pretty soon here comes the camel-driver bawling after him again and whines and slobbers around and begs another ten off of him, saying thirty camel-loads of treasure was enough to see a Dervish through because they live very simple, you know, and don't keep house but board around and give their note. But that weren'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 forget the Dervish as long as he lived and nobody hadn't been so good to him before and liberal. So they shook hands good-bye and separated and started off again. But do you know, and were ten minutes till the camel-driver was unsatisfied again. He was the load down as reptile in seven counties. And he came a-running again. This time the thing he wanted was to get the Dervish to rub some of the salve on his other eye. Why? said the Dervish. Oh, you know, says the driver. Know what? Well, you can't fool me, says the driver. You're trying to keep back something from me. You know it mighty well. You know I reckon that if I had the salve on the other eye I could see a lot more things that's valuable. Come, please put it on. The Dervish says, I wasn't keeping anything back from you. I don't mind telling you what would happen if I put it on. You'd never see again. You'd be stone-blind the rest of your days. But do you know that Beat wouldn't believe him? No. He begged and begged, and whined and cried, till at last the Dervish opened his box and told him to put it on if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure enough he was as blind as a bat in a minute. Then the Dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him, and says, Goodbye, a man that's blind, ain't got no use for jewelry. And he cleared out with a hundred camels and left that man to wander round poor and miserable and friendless the rest of his days in the desert. Jim said he'd bet it was a lesson to him. Yes, Tom says, and lack of 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 Henskovel 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 had no more backs to break. Well, to sing, minus Tom, there is such a thing as learning by experience. And the good book said, To burn child shun to fire. Well, I ain't denying that a thing is a lesson if it's a thing that can happen twice just the same way. There's lots of such things, they educate a person, that's what Uncle Abner always said, but there's forty million lots of the other kind, the kind that don't happen the same way twice, and they ain't no real use. It ain't no more instructive than the smallpox. When you've got it, it ain't no good to find out you ought to be vaccinated and ain't no good to get vaccinated afterward, because the smallpox 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 getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him and weren't ever going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you, Jim, Uncle Abner was down on them people that it's all the time trying to dig a lesson out of everything that happens, no matter whether. But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed, because you know a person always feels bad when he's talking uncommon fine, and thinks the other person is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that way. Of course, he ought to go to sleep because it's shabby, but the finer a person talks, the certainer it is to make you sleep, and so when you come to look at it, it ain't nobody's fault in particular, both of them's to blame. Jim began 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 bathtub, and 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 dipper full of loudenum in him, but can't wake himself up, although all that awful noise of his ain't but three inches from his own ears. And that is the curious 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 weren't nobody, nor nothing that was as close to the noise as he was, and yet he was the only critter 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 is Tom, and there ain't no way to find out why a snore can't hear himself snore. Jim said he hadn't been asleep. He just shut his eyes so he could listen better. Tom said nobody weren't accusing him. That made him look like he wished he hadn't said anything, and he wanted to get away from the subject, I reckon, because he began 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 led into the camel driver, the hardest he knowed how, and I had to agree with him, and he praised up the dervish the highest he could, and I had to agree with him there, too. But Tom says, I ain't so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful liberal and good and unselfish, but I don't quite see it. He didn't hunt up another poor dervish, did he? No, he didn't. If he was so unselfish, why didn't he go in there himself and take a pocket full of jewels and go along and be satisfied? No, sir. The person he was hunting for was a man with a hundred camels. He wanted to get away with all the treasure he could. Why, Mars Tom, he was willing to divide fair and square. He only struck for fifty camels. Because he knowed how he was going to get all of them by and by. Mars Tom, he told a man the truck would make him blind. 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 get hold of them. They don't put the salve on. Oh, no, that would be sin. But they know how to fool you into putting it on. Then it's you that blinds yourself. I reckon the dervish and the camel driver was just a pair. A fine, smart, brainy rascal and a dull, coarse, ignorant one. But both of them rascals just the same. Mars Tom, does you reckon there's any adept kind of salve in the world now? Yes, Uncle Abner says there is. He says they've got it in New York, and they put it on country people's eyes and show them all the railroads in the world, and they go in and get them. And then, when they rub the salve on the other eye, the other man bids them goodbye and goes off with their railroads. Here's the treasure hill now. Lower away! We landed, but it weren't as interesting as I thought it was going to be, because we couldn't find the place where they went in to get the treasure. Still, it was plenty interesting enough just to see the mere hill itself where such a wonderful thing happened. Jim said he wouldn't have missed it for three dollars, and I felt the same way. And to me and Jim, as wonderful a thing as any, was the way Tom could come into a strange big country like this and go straight and find a little hump like that, and tell it in a minute from a million other humps that was almost just like it, and nothing to help him but only his own learning and his own natural smartness. We talked and talked it over together, but couldn't make out how he'd 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 Kid or George Washington. I bet you it would have crowded either of them to find that hill with all their gifts, but it weren't nothing to Tom Sawyer. He went across Sahara and put his finger on it as easy as you could pick a nigger out of a bunch of angels. We found a pond of salt water close by and scraped up a raft of salt around the edges and loaded up the lion's skin and the tigers so as they would keep till Jim could tan them. CHAPTER X 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 figures moving across its big silver face. You could see them as plain as if they were 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 weren't going our way. It was a rattler of that caravan and a most bully sight to look at next morning when the sun came streaming across the desert and flung the long shatters of the camels on the gold sand like a thousand granddaddy long legs marching in procession. We never went very near it because we know it 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 knobby style. Some of the chiefs rode on dramataries, 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 betcha, but they make noble good time, and a camel ain't no where's with them for speed. The caravan camped during the middle part of the day, and then started again about the middle of the afternoon. Before long the sun begun to look very curious. First it kinda turned to brass, then to copper, and after that it began 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. Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up like an amazing wide wall, and reached from the desert up into the sky and hid the sun, and it was coming like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck us, and then it come harder, and grains of sand begun to sift against our faces and sting like fire, and Tom sung out, It's a sandstorm! Turn your backs to it! We'd 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 sitting on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our heads out and could hardly breathe. Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous wall go a-sailing off across the desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out, and looked down, and where the caravan was before, there wasn't anything but just the sand to 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 come of that caravan. Tom said, Now we know what it was that happened to the people we got the swords and pistols from. Yes, sir, that was just it. It was as plain as day now. They got buried in a sandstorm, and the wild animals couldn't get at them, and the wind never uncovered them again until they was dried to leather and weren'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 hovering around them a whole night, and most the whole day, and had got to feeling real friendly with them, and acquainted. I have found out that there ain't no sure 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 glatter and glatter 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 Mr. 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. Alexander Robinson and Ms. Adeline Robinson, and Colonel Jacob McDougal and Ms. Harriet McDougal, and Judge Jeremiah Butler and Young Bushrod Butler, and these was big chiefs, mostly, that wore splendid great turbans and simitors, 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 weren't Mr. nor Judge nor nothing any more, but only Alec and Addy, and Jake and Hattie and Jerry and Buck, and so on. And you know the more you join in with people and their joys and their sorrows, the more near and dear they come to be to you. Now we weren't cold and indifferent the way most travelers is. We was right down friendly and sociable, and took a chance in everything that was going, and the caravan could depend on us to be on hand every time it didn't make no difference what it was. When they camped, we camped right over them, ten or twelve hundred feet up in the air. When they ate a meal, we ate on, and it made it ever so much home like her 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 blowout, and when they danced, we jined in and shook a foot up there. But it is sorrow and trouble that brings you the nearest, and it was a funeral that done it with us. It was next morning, just in the still dawn, we didn't know the diseased, and he weren't in our set, but that never made no difference. He belonged to the caravan, and that was enough. And there weren't no more sincere tears shed over him than the ones we dripped on him from up there, eleven hundred foot on high. Yes, parting with this caravan was much more bitterer than it was to part with them others, which was comparative strangers, and been dead so long anyway. We had known these in their lives, and was fond of them too, and now, to have death snatch them from right before our faces whilst 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 might never make any more friends on that voyage if we was going to lose them again like that. We couldn't keep from talking about them, and they was all the time coming up in our memory, and looking just the way they looked when we was all alive and happy together. We could see the line marching, and the shiny spearheads a-winking in the sun, we could see the drama-daries lumbering along, we could see the wedding and the funeral, and more oftener than anything else, we could see them praying because they don't allow nothing to prevent that. Whenever the call come, several times a day, they would stop right there, and stand up and face to the east, and lift back their heads, and spread out their arms and begin, and four or five times they would go down on their knees, and then fall forward and touch their forehead to the ground. Well, it weren'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 downhearted. 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. They weren't no use to disappoint him, he was feeling bad enough just as it was. When we woke up next morning, we was feeling a little cheerfuler, 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 a balloon so steady before. Tom allowed we had twenty tons of it, and wondered what we better do with it. It was good sand, and it didn't seem good sense to throw it away. Jim says, Mars, Tom, can't we tote it back home and sell it? How long it'll take? Depends on the way we go. Well, sir, she's worth a quarter of a dollar a load at home, and I reckon we's got as many as twenty loads, ain't we? How much would that be? Five dollars? By jing's, Mars, Tom, let's shove for home right on the spot. It's more than a dollar and a half piece, ain't it? Yes? Well, if dad ain't makin' money the easiest ever, I struck. She just reigned in. Never cost us a lick of work. Let's mosey right along, Mars, Tom. But Tom was thinkin' and ciphering away so busy and excited he never heard him. Pretty soon he says, five dollars shoal. Look here, this sand's worth, worth why, it's worth no end of money. How's that, Mars, Tom? Go on, honey, go on. Well, the minute people knows it's genuine sand from the genuine desert of Sahara, they'll just be in a perfect state of mind to get hold of some of it, to keep on the what-not, in a vial with a label on it for curiosity. All we gotta do is to put it up in vials and float around all over the United States and pedal them out at ten cents a piece. We've got all of ten thousand dollars worth of sand in this boat. Me and Jim went all to pieces with joy and begun to shout, whoop jamboree-hoo, and Tom says, and we can keep on coming back and fetching sand and coming back and fetching more sand, and just keep it a going till we've carted this whole desert over there and sold it out. And there ain't ever going to be any opposition either because we'll take out a patent. My goodness, I says, we'll be as rich as creosote, won't we, Tom? Yes? Creases, you mean. Why, that dervish was hunting in that little hill for the treasures of the earth and didn't know he was walking over the real ones for a thousand miles. He was blinder than he made the driver. Mars, Tom, how much is we going to be worth? Well, I don't know yet. It's got to be ciphered, and it ain't the easiest job to do, either, because it's over four million square miles of sand at ten cents a vial. Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out considerable, and he shook his head and says, Mars, Tom, we can't afford all them vials. A king couldn't. We better not try to take the whole desert, Mars, Tom. The vials grind to bust a show. Tom's excitement died out, too, now, and I reckoned it was on account of the vials, but it wasn't. He sat there thinking and got bluer and bluer, and last he says, Boys, it won't work. We got to give it up. Why, Tom? On account of the duties. I couldn't make nothing out of that, neither could Jim. I says, What is our duty, Tom? Because if we can't get around it, why can't we just do it? People often test it. But he says, Oh, it ain't that kind of duty. The kind I mean is a tax. Whenever you strike a frontier, that's the border of a country, you know, you find a custom house there, and the government officers comes and rummages amongst 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 get tired, just frontier after frontier, Egypt, Arabia, Hindustan, and so on, and they'll all whack on a duty, and so you see, easy enough, we can't go that road. Why, Tom, I says, we can sail right over their old frontiers. How are they going to stop us? He looked sorrowful at me and says very grave, Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest? I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said nothing, and he went on. Well, we're shut off the other way, too. If we go back the way we've come, there's the New York Custom House, and that is worse than all of them others put together on account of the kind of cargo we've got. Why? Well, they can't raise Sahara sand in America, of course, and when they can't raise a thing there, the duty is fourteen hundred thousand percent on it if you try to fetch it in from where they do raise it. There ain't no sense in that, Tom Sawyer, who said there was. What do you talk to me like that for, Huck Finn? You wait till I say a thing's got sense in it before you go to cues in me of saying it. All right, consider me crying about it, and sorry, go on. Jim says, Maas Tom, do they jam that duty onto everything we can't raise in America and don't make no distinction to extend anything? Yes, that's what they do. Maas Tom, ain't the blessing of the Lord the most valuable thing there is? Yes, it is. Don't the preacher stand up in the pulpit and call it down on the people? Yes? Why, do it come from? From heaven? Yes, sir. Use just right. Did you is, honey. It come from heaven, and that's a foreign country. Now then, do they put a tax on that blessing? No, they don't. Of course they don't, and so it's standard reason that you've mistaken, Maas Tom. They wouldn't put the tax on a pulled truck like sand that everybody ain't bleached to have and leave it off on the best thing there is, which nobody can't get along without. Tom Sawyer was stumped. You see, Jim had got him where he couldn't budge. He tried to wiggle out by saying they had forgot to put on that tax. But they'd be sure to remember about it next session of Congress, and then they'd put it on. But that was a poor lame come off, and he noted. He said there weren't nothing foreign that weren'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 we'd be certain to do their best to fix it before they got caught and laughed at. But I didn't feel no more interest in such things as long as we couldn't get 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 have 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 diamonds. 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 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, Let's throw this truck overboard. Well, it was going to be work, you know, and pretty solid work, too. So, Tom, he divided it up according to fairness and strength. He said me and him would clear out a fifth a piece of the sand and Jim three-fifths. Jim, he didn't quite like that arrangement. He says, Of course, eyes the strongest, and eyes willing to do a share of cordon. But by Jim's use kind of piling it on to old Jim Mars Tom, ain't you? Well, I didn't think so, Jim, but you try your hand at fixing it, and let's see. So, Jim, he reckoned it wouldn't be no more than fair if me and Tom done a tenth a piece. Tom, he turned his back to get room and be private, and then he smol 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 round again and said it was a good enough arrangement, and we were satisfied if Jim was. Jim said he was. So then Tom measured off our two tenths in the bow and left the rest for Jim, and it surprised Jim a good deal to see how much difference there was and what a raging lot of sand his share come to, and said he was powerful glad now that he had spoke up in time and got the first arrangement altered, for he said that even the way it was now there was more sand than enjoyment in his end of the contract, he believed. Then we laid into it. It was mighty hot work and tough, so hot we had to move up into cooler weather, or we couldn't have stood it. Me and Tom took turn about, and one worked while the other rested, but there weren'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 were 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 thankful as he could be, and would sit 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 forget us. He was always the gratefulest nigger I ever see, for any little thing you'd done for him. He was only nigger outside. Inside, he was as white as you be. End of Chapter 11 The next few meals was pretty sandy, but that don't make no difference when you're hungry. When you ain't, it ain't no satisfaction to eat, anyway, and so a little grit in the meat ain't no particular drawback as far as I can see. Then we struck the east end of the desert at last, sailing on a northeast course. Away off on the edge of the sand, in a soft pinky light, we see three little sharp roofs, like tents, and Tom says, It's the pyramids of Egypt. It made my heart fair and jump. You see, I had seen a many and a many a picture of them, and heard tell about them a hundred times, and yet to come on them all of a sudden that way and find they was real, instead 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 figure made out of moonshine and nothing solid to it. It's just so with George Washington and the same with them pyramids. And moreover, besides, the thing they always said about them seemed to me to be stretchers. There was a feller come to the Sunday school once and had a picture of them and made of 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 have 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 Methuselum weren't that old, and nobody claims it. As we come a little nearer we see the yaller sand come to an end in a long straight edge like a blanket, and on to it was joined, edge to edge, a wide country of bright green, with a sneaky 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 it makes your eyes water to look at it, and you've been a considerable part of a week doing it, the green country will look so like home and heaven to you, that it will make your eyes water again. It was just so with me, and the same with Jim. And when Jim got so he could believe it was the land of Egypt he was looking at, he wouldn't enter it standing up, but got down on his knees and took off his hat, because he said it wasn't fitting for a humble poor nigger to come on 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, it's the land of Egypt, the land of Egypt, and eyes loud to look at it with my own eyes, and eyes the river that was turned to blood, and eyes looking at the very same ground where the plagues was, and the lice, and the frogs, and the locus, and the hail, and where they marked the doorposts, and the angel of the Lord come by in the darkness of the night, and slew the firstborn in all the land of Egypt. Old Jim ain't worthy to see this day. 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 and the bullrushes, Jacob coming down into Egypt by corn, the silver cup and the sack, and all them interesting things, and Tom just as excited too because the land was so full of history that was in his line about New Redden and Bed Redden, and such like monstrous giants that made Jim's wool rise, and a raft of other Arabian knights-folks which the half of them never done the things they let on they done, I don't believe. Then we struck a disappointment. For one of them early morning fog started up, and it weren'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 it by compass straight for the place where the pyramids was getting blurred and blotted out, and then drop low and skin along pretty close to the ground and keep a sharp look out. Tom took the helm, I stood by to let go the anchor, and Jim he straddled about to dig through the fog with his eyes and watch out for danger ahead. We went along the steady gate, 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, heist her a pint, my Tom heist 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 restraining our ears for sounds and holding our breath, the fog thinned a little, very sudden, and Jim sung out in an awful scare. Oh, for the land's sake, this center back, Mars, Tom, is the biggest giant out in the Arabian Nights are coming for us! And he went over backwards in the boat. Tom slammed on the back-action, and as we slowed to a standstill, a man's face as big as our house at home looked in over the gunnel, same as our house looks out of its windows, and I lay down and died. I must have been clear dead and gone for as much as a minute or more. Then I come to, and Tom had hitched a boat-hook onto the lower lip of the giant, and was holding the balloon steady with it whilst he canted his head back and got a good long look up at that awful face. Jim was on his knees with his hands clasped, gazing up at the thing in a begging way and working his lips, but not getting anything out. I took only just a glimpse, and was fading out again. But Tom says, He ain't alive, you fools, it's the Sphinx! I never see Tom look so little and like a fly, but that was because the giant's head was so big and awful. Awful, yes, so it was, but not dreadful any more, because you could see it was a noble face, and kind of sad, and not thinking about you, but about other things and larger. It was stone, reddish stone, and its nose and ears battered, and that gave it an abused look, and you felt sorry for it for that. We stood off a piece and sailed around it and over it, and it was just grand. It was a man's head, or maybe a woman's, on a tiger's body 125 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. He took a power of sand to bury that critter, most of as much as it would to bury a steamboat, I reckon. We landed Jim on top of the head with an American flag to protect him, it being a foreign land. Then we sailed off to this and that and to other distance to get 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 it 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, Julius Caesar's niggers didn't know how big he was, they was too close to him. Then we sailed off further and further, till we couldn't see Jim at all any more, and then that great figure was at its noblest, a gazing out over the Nile Valley so still and solemn and lonesome, and all of those shabby huts and things that were scattered about it clean disappeared and gone, and nothing around it now but a soft, wide spread of yaller velvet, which was the sand. That was the right place to stop, and we done it. We sat there, a-looking and a-thinking for a half an hour, nobody is saying anything, for it made us feel quiet and kind of solemn to remember it had been looking over that valley just that same way and thinking its awful thoughts all to itself for thousands of years, and nobody can't find out what they are to this day. At last I took up the glass and see some little black things capering around on that velvet carpet, and some more were climbing up the critters back, and then I see two or three wee puffs of white smoke and told Tom to look. He done it, and says, They're bugs. No. Hold on. They— Wow! 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, but there's some more puffs of smoke. It's guns! Huck! They're after Jim! We clapped on the power and went for them a-balling. We was there in no time, and kind of whizzing down amongst them, and they broke and scattered every which way, and some that was climbing the ladder after Jim let go all holds 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'd been standing a siege a long time—a week, he said, but it weren'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 get at him when he was laying down, they went for the ladder, and then he noted 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 get in the name of the United States. Jim said he'd done it, but they never paid no attention. Tom said he would have this thing looked into at Washington, and says, you'll see that they'll have to apologize for insulting the flag and paying indemnity, too, on top of it, even if they get off that easy. Jim says, what's an indemnity, Mars Tom? It's cash. That's what it is. Who gets it, Mars Tom? Why, we do. And who gets the apology? The United States. Or we can take whichever we please. We can take the apology, if we want to, and let the government take the money. How much money will it be, Mars Tom? Well, in an aggravated case like this one, it will be at least three dollars a piece, and I don't know but more. Well then, we'll take the money, Mars Tom, blame the apology. Ain't that your notion, too? And ain't it your own, Huck? We talked it over a little and allowed that that was as good a way as any, so we agreed to take the money. It was a new business to me, and I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says, yes, the little ones does. We were 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 clumbed away, 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 weren't far away, and the people moving about on the sand between looked like bugs crawling. We were so high above them. Tom, he couldn't hold himself. He was so worked up with gladness and astonishment to be in such a celebrated place, and he just dripped history from every pore, seemed to me. He said he couldn't scarcely believe he was standing on the very identical spot the prince flew from on the bronze horse. It was in the Arabian night's times, he said. Somebody give the prince a bronze horse with a peg in its shoulder, and he could get on him and fly through the air like a bird, and go all over the world, and steer it by turning the peg, and fly high or low and land wherever he wanted to. When he got done telling it there was one of them uncomfortable silences that comes, you know, when a person has been telling a whopper and you feel sorry for him and wish you could think of some way to change the subject and let him down easy, but get stuck and don't see no way, and before you can pull your mind together and do something, that silence has got in and spread itself and done the business. I was embarrassed. Jim, he was embarrassed, and neither of us couldn't say a word. Well, Tom, he glowered at me a minute and says, Come, out with it. What do you think? I says, Tom Sawyer, you don't believe that yourself. What's the reason I don't? What's to hinder me? There's one thing to hinder you. It couldn't happen, that's all. What's the reason it couldn't happen? You tell me the reason it could happen. This balloon is a good enough reason it could happen, I should reckon. Why is it? Why is it? I never saw such an idiot. Ain't this balloon and the bronze horse the same thing under different names? No, they're not. One is a balloon and the other is a horse. It's very different. Next you'll be saying a house and a cow is the same thing. By Jackson, Huck's got them again. They ain't no wiggling out of that. Shut your head, Jim. You don't know what you're talking about. And Huck don't. Look here, Huck. I'll make it plain to you, so you can understand. You see, it ain't the mere form that's got anything to do with there being similar or unsimilar. It's the principle involved. And the principle is the same in both. Don't you see now? I turned it over in my mind and says, Tom, it ain't no use. Principles is all very well, but they don't get around that one big fact that the thing that a balloon can do ain't no sort of proof of what a horse can do. Shucks, Huck. You don't get the idea at all. Now, look here a minute. It's perfectly plain. Don't we fly through the air? Yes. Very well. Don't we fly high or fly low, just as we please? Yes. Don't we steer whichever way we want to? Yes. And don't we land when and where we please? Yes. How do we move the balloon and steer it? By touching the buttons. Now I reckon the thing is clear to you at last. In the other case, the moving and steering was done by turning a peg. We touch a button, the prince turned a peg. There ain't an atom of difference, you see. I knowed I could get it through your head if I stuck to it long enough. He felt so happy he began to whistle, but me and Jim was silent, so he broke off surprised and says, Looky here, Huck Finn. Don't you see it yet? I says, Tom Sawyer, I want to ask you some questions. Go ahead, he says, and I see Jim Chirk up to listen. As I understand it, the whole thing is in the buttons and the peg. The rest ain't of no consequence. A button is one shape, a peg is another shape, but that ain't any matter. No, that ain't any matter, as long as they both got the same power. All right, then. What is the power that's in a candle and in a match? It's the fire. It's the same in both, then. Yes, just the same in both. All right. Suppose I set fire to a carpenter's shop with a match. What will happen to that carpenter's shop? She'll burn up. And suppose I set fire to this pyramid with a candle. Will she burn up? Of course she won't. All right, now the fire's the same both times. Why does the shop burn and the pyramid don't? Because the pyramid can't burn. Aha! And a horse can't fly. My land, if Huck ain't got him again. Huck's landed him high and dry this time, I tell you. It's the smartest tribe I ever see a body walk into, and if I—but Jim was so full of laugh he got so strangled and couldn't go on, and Tom was that mad to see how neat I had floored him and turned his own argument against 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. End of Chapter 12 This is Chapter 13 of Tom Sawyer Abroad. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Tom Sawyer Abroad, Chapter 13. Going for Tom's Pipe By and by we left Jim to float around up there in the neighborhood of the pyramids, and we clummed 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 got him. But I didn't take no interest in the place because there could be ghosts there, of course, not fresh ones, but I don't like no kind. So then we come out and got some little donkeys and rode a piece, and then went in a boat and other 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 palms on both sides, and naked children everywhere, and the man 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'd done it, a perfect jam, you see, and everybody noisy. The stores weren't big enough to turn round in, but you didn't have to go in. The storekeeper sat tailor-fashioned on his counter, smoking his sneaky long pipe, and had his things where he could reach them to sell, and he was just as good as in the street, for the camel-loads brushed him as they went by. Now and then a grand person flew by in a carriage with fancy-dressed men running and yelling in front of it, and whacking anybody with a long rod that didn't get out of the way, and by and by along comes the sultan riding a 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 fellow helped me remember. He was one that had a rod and run in front. There was churches, but they don't know enough to keep Sunday, they keep Friday and break the Sabbath. You have to take off your shoes when you go in. There was crowds of men and boys in the church, setting in groups on the stone floor, and making no end of noise, getting their lessons by heart, Tom said, out of the Koran, which they think is a Bible, and people that knows better knows enough to not let on. I never see such a big church in my life before, and most awful high it was, it made you dizzy to look up. Our village church at home ain't a circumstance to it. If you was to put it in there, people would think it was a dry-goods box. What I wanted to see was a dervish, because I was interested in dervishes on accounts of the one that played the trick on the camel driver, so we found a lot in a kind of 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 Muslim, as Tom said, and when I asked him what a Muslim was, he said it was a person that wasn't a Presbyterian. So there is plenty of them in Missouri, though I didn't know it before. We didn't see half there was to see in Cairo, because Tom was in such a sweat to hunt out places that was celebrated in history. We had a most tiresome time to find the granary where Joseph stored up the grain before the famine, and when we found it it weren'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 have 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 recognized it, as easy as I would recognize my other shirt if I had one. But how he'd done it? He couldn't any more tell me than he could fly. He said so himself. Then we hunted a long time for the house where the boy lived that learned the caddy 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 get somebody that knowed the town and could talk Missouri and 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 remarkable 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 recognize it. Well, I says to myself, how does he do it? Is it knowledge or is it instinct? Now, there's the facts, just as they happened. Let everybody explain it their own way. I've ciphered over at a good deal, and it's my opinion that some of it is knowledge, but the main bulk of it is instinct. 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 instinct, not knowledge. Instinct tells him where the exact place is for the brick to be in, and so he recognizes it by the place it's in, not by the look of the brick. If it was knowledge, not instinct, 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, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness. Jim says the same. When we got back, Jim dropped down and took us in, and there was a young man there with a red skullcap and tasselon 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 everywhere for a half a dollar a day and his keep. And we hired him and left, and piled on the power. 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 hovered over Mount Sinai, and saw the place where Moses broke the tables of stone and where the children of Israel camped in the plain and worshiped the golden calf, and it was all just as interesting as could be, and the guide knowed every place as well as I knowed the village at home. But we had an accident now, and it fetched all the plans to a stand still. Tom's old ornery corn cob pipe had got so old and swelled and warped that she couldn't hold together any longer, notwithstanding the strings and bandages, but caved in and went to pieces. Tom he didn't know what to do. The professor's pipe wouldn't answer. It weren't anything but a mirsham. 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 get him to smoke any other. He wouldn't take mine. I couldn't persuade him. So there he was. He thought it over, and said, We must scour round 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 weren't no use. They didn't have them. So Tom was pretty glum for a little while. Then he jerked up and said he'd got the idea and knowed what to do. He says, I've got another corn cob pipe and it's a prime one too, and nearly new. It's laying on the rafter that's right over the kitchen stove at home in the village. Jim, you and the guide will go and get it, and me and Huck will camp here on Mount Sinai till you come back. But, Mars Tom, we couldn't ever find a village. I could find a pipe because I know it's the kitchen. But my land, we can't ever find a village, nor St. Louis, nor none of them places. We don't know the way, Mars Tom. That was a fact, and it stumped Tom for a minute. Then he said, Looky here. It can be done, sure, and I'll tell you how. You set your compass and sail west as straight as a dart till you find the United States. It ain't any trouble because it's the first land you'll strike the other side of the Atlantic. If it's daytime when you strike it, bulge right on, straight west from the upper part of the Florida coast, and in an hour and three quarters you'll hit the mouth of the Mississippi at the speed that I'm going to send you. You'll be so high up in the air that the earth will be curved considerable, sort of 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. The way 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. If it's that easy, Mars-Tom, I reckon we can do it. Yes, I knows we can. The guide was sure of it too, and thought that he could learn to stand his watch in a little while. Jim can learn you the whole thing in a half an hour, Tom said. This balloon's as easy to manage as a canoe. Tom got out the chart, and marked out the course, and measured it, and says, To go back west is the shortest way you see. It's only about seven thousand miles. If you went east, and so on around, it's over twice as far. Then he says to the guide, I want you both to watch the telltale 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. We'll hunt for them, sir. See that you do. Sometimes you may have to go up a couple of miles, and it'll be pys and cold, but most of the time you'll find your storm a good deal lower if you can only strike a cyclone. That's the ticket for you. You'll see by the professor's books that they travel west in these latitudes, and they travel low too. Then he ciphered on the time and says, Seven thousand miles, three hundred miles an hour, you can make the trip in a day, twenty-four hours. This is Thursday. You'll be back here Saturday afternoon. Come now, hustle out some blankets and food and books and things for me and Huck, and you can start right along. There ain't no occasion to fool around. I want a smoke, and the quicker you fetch that pipe the better. All hands jumped for the things, and in eight minutes our things was out and the balloon was ready for America, so we shook hands good-bye, and Tom gave his last orders. It's ten minutes to two p.m. now, Mount Sinai time. In twenty-four hours you'll be home, and it'll be six tomorrow 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 don't know you. Then you go and slip in the back way to the kitchen and get 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 get away, and don't let Aunt Polly catch a sight of you nor anybody else. Then you jump for the balloon and shove from Mount Sinai three hundred miles an hour. You won't have lost more than an hour. You'll start back at seven or eight a.m. village time, and be here in twenty-four hours, arriving at two or three p.m. Mount Sinai time. Tom, he read the piece of paper to us, he enroute on it, Thursday afternoon. Tom Sawyer, the Aeronaut, sends his love to Aunt Polly from Mount Sinai where the ark was, and so does Huck Finn, and she will get it tomorrow morning half past six. Tom Sawyer, the Aeronaut. Note, this misplacing of the ark is probably Huck's error, not Tom's. M.T. That'll make her eyes bulge out and the tears come, he says. Then he says, Stand by! One, two, three, away you go! And away she did go. Why, she seemed to whiz out a sight in a second. Then we found a most comfortable cave that looked out over the whole big plain, and there we camped to wait for the pipe. The balloon come back all right and brun 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, Maz Tom, she's out on the porch, with her eyes set on the sky lying for you, and she say she ain't going to budge from there till she gets a hold of you. There's going to be trouble, Maz Tom, D. Day is. So then we shoved for home, and not feeling very gay, neither. The End of Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain