Tom Sawyer Abroad

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Tom Sawyer Abroad


We hauled in the ladder and dropped down till we was just above the reach
of the animals, then we let down a rope with a slip-knot in it and hauled
up a dead lion, a small tender one, then yanked up a cub tiger. We had to
keep the congregation off with the revolver, or they would 'a' took a
hand in the proceedings and helped.

We carved off a supply from both, and saved the skins, and hove the rest
overboard. Then we baited some of the professor's hooks with the fresh
meat and went a-fishing. We stood over the lake just a convenient
distance above the water, and catched a lot of the nicest fish you ever
see. It was a most amazing good supper we had; lion steak, tiger steak,
fried fish, and hot corn-pone. I don't want nothing better than that.

We had some fruit to finish off with. We got it out of the top of a
monstrous tall tree. It was a very slim tree that hadn't a branch on it
from the bottom plumb to the top, and there it bursted out like a
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.

By this time monstrous big birds begun to come and settle on the dead
animals. They was plucky creturs; they would tackle one end of a lion
that was being gnawed at the other end by another lion. If the lion drove
the bird away, it didn't do no good; he was back again the minute the
lion was busy.

The big birds come out of every part of the sky--you could make them out
with the glass while they was still so far away you couldn't see them
with your naked eye. Tom said the birds didn't find out the meat was
there by the smell; they had to find it out by seeing it. Oh, but ain't
that an eye for you! Tom said at the distance of five mile a patch of
dead lions couldn't look any bigger than a person's finger-nail, and he
couldn't imagine how the birds could notice such a little thing so far
off.

It was strange and unnatural to see lion eat lion, and we thought maybe
they warn't kin. But Jim said that didn't make no difference. He said a
hog was fond of her own children, and so was a spider, and he reckoned
maybe a lion was pretty near as unprincipled though maybe not quite. He
thought likely a lion wouldn't eat his own father, if he knowed which was
him, but reckoned he would eat his brother-in-law if he was uncommon
hungry, and eat his mother-in-law any time. But RECKONING don't settle
nothing. You can reckon till the cows come home, but that don't fetch you
to no decision. So we give it up and let it drop.

Generly it was very still in the Desert nights, but this time there was
music. A lot of other animals come to dinner; sneaking yelpers that Tom
allowed was jackals, and roached-backed ones that he said was hyenas; and
all the whole biling of them kept up a racket all the time. They made a
picture in the moonlight that was more different than any picture I ever
see. We had a line out and made fast to the top of a tree, and didn't
stand no watch, but all turned in and slept; but I was up two or three
times to look down at the animals and hear the music. It was like having
a front seat at a menagerie for nothing, which I hadn't ever had before,
and so it seemed foolish to sleep and not make the most of it; I mightn't
ever have such a chance again.

We went a-fishing again in the early dawn, and then lazied around all day
in the deep shade on an island, taking turn about to watch and see that
none of the animals come a-snooping around there after erronorts for
dinner. We was going to leave the next day, but couldn't, it was too
lovely.

The day after, when we rose up toward the sky and sailed off eastward, we
looked back and watched that place till it warn't nothing but just a
speck in the Desert, and I tell you it was like saying good-bye to a
friend that you ain't ever going to see any more.

Jim was thinking to himself, and at last he says:

"Mars Tom, we's mos' to de end er de Desert now, I speck."

"Why?"

"Well, hit stan' to reason we is. You knows how long we's been a-skimmin'
over it. Mus' be mos' out o' san'. Hit's a wonder to me dat it's hilt out
as long as it has."

"Shucks, there's plenty sand, you needn't worry."

"Oh, I ain't a-worryin', Mars Tom, only wonderin', dat's all. De Lord's
got plenty san', I ain't doubtin' dat; but nemmine, He ain't gwyne to
WAS'E it jist on dat account; en I allows dat dis Desert's plenty big
enough now, jist de way she is, en you can't spread her out no mo' 'dout
was'in' san'."

"Oh, go 'long! we ain't much more than fairly STARTED across this Desert
yet. The United States is a pretty big country, ain't it? Ain't it,
Huck?"

"Yes," I says, "there ain't no bigger one, I don't reckon."

"Well," he says, "this Desert is about the shape of the United States,
and if you was to lay it down on top of the United States, it would cover
the land of the free out of sight like a blanket. There'd be a little
corner sticking out, up at Maine and away up northwest, and Florida
sticking out like a turtle's tail, and that's all. We've took California
away from the Mexicans two or three years ago, so that part of the
Pacific coast is ours now, and if you laid the Great Sahara down with her
edge on the Pacific, she would cover the United States and stick out past
New York six hundred miles into the Atlantic ocean."

I say:

"Good land! have you got the documents for that, Tom Sawyer?"

"Yes, and they're right here, and I've been studying them. You can look
for yourself. From New York to the Pacific is 2,600 miles. From one end
of the Great Desert to the other is 3,200. The United States contains
3,600,000 square miles, the Desert contains 4,162,000. With the Desert's
bulk you could cover up every last inch of the United States, and in
under where the edges projected out, you could tuck England, Scotland,
Ireland, France, Denmark, and all Germany. Yes, sir, you could hide the
home of the brave and all of them countries clean out of sight under the
Great Sahara, and you would still have 2,000 square miles of sand left."

"Well," I says, "it clean beats me. Why, Tom, it shows that the Lord took
as much pains makin' this Desert as makin' the United States and all them
other countries."

Jim says: "Huck, dat don' stan' to reason. I reckon dis Desert wa'n't
made at all. Now you take en look at it like dis--you look at it, and see
ef I's right. What's a desert good for? 'Taint good for nuthin'. Dey
ain't no way to make it pay. Hain't dat so, Huck?"

"Yes, I reckon."

"Hain't it so, Mars Tom?"

"I guess so. Go on."

"Ef a thing ain't no good, it's made in vain, ain't it?"

"Yes."

"NOW, den! Do de Lord make anything in vain? You answer me dat."

"Well--no, He don't."

"Den how come He make a desert?"

"Well, go on. How DID He come to make it?"

"Mars Tom, I b'lieve it uz jes like when you's buildin' a house; dey's
allays a lot o' truck en rubbish lef' over. What does you do wid it?
Doan' you take en k'yart it off en dump it into a ole vacant back lot?
'Course. Now, den, it's my opinion hit was jes like dat--dat de Great
Sahara warn't made at all, she jes HAPPEN'."

I said it was a real good argument, and I believed it was the best one
Jim ever made. Tom he said the same, but said the trouble about arguments
is, they ain't nothing but THEORIES, after all, and theories don't prove
nothing, they only give you a place to rest on, a spell, when you are
tuckered out butting around and around trying to find out something there
ain't no way TO find out. And he says:

"There's another trouble about theories: there's always a hole in them
somewheres, sure, if you look close enough. It's just so with this one of
Jim's. Look what billions and billions of stars there is. How does it
come that there was just exactly enough star-stuff, and none left over?
How does it come there ain't no sand-pile up there?"

But Jim was fixed for him and says:

"What's de Milky Way?--dat's what I want to know. What's de Milky Way?
Answer me dat!"

In my opinion it was just a sockdologer. It's only an opinion, it's only
MY opinion and others may think different; but I said it then and I stand
to it now--it was a sockdologer. And moreover, besides, it landed Tom
Sawyer. He couldn't say a word. He had that stunned look of a person
that's been shot in the back with a kag of nails. All he said was, as for
people like me and Jim, he'd just as soon have intellectual intercourse
with a catfish. But anybody can say that--and I notice they always do,
when somebody has fetched them a lifter. Tom Sawyer was tired of that end
of the subject.

So we got back to talking about the size of the Desert again, and the
more we compared it with this and that and t'other thing, the more nobler
and bigger and grander it got to look right along. And so, hunting among
the figgers, Tom found, by and by, that it was just the same size as the
Empire of China. Then he showed us the spread the Empire of China made on
the map, and the room she took up in the world. Well, it was wonderful to
think of, and I says:

"Why, I've heard talk about this Desert plenty of times, but I never
knowed before how important she was."

Then Tom says:

"Important! Sahara important! That's just the way with some people. If a
thing's big, it's important. That's all the sense they've got. All they
can see is SIZE. Why, look at England. It's the most important country in
the world; and yet you could put it in China's vest-pocket; and not only
that, but you'd have the dickens's own time to find it again the next
time you wanted it. And look at Russia. It spreads all around and
everywhere, and yet ain't no more important in this world than Rhode
Island is, and hasn't got half as much in it that's worth saving."

Away off now we see a little hill, a-standing up just on the edge of the
world. Tom broke off his talk, and reached for a glass very much excited,
and took a look, and says:

"That's it--it's the one I've been looking for, sure. If I'm right, it's
the one the dervish took the man into and showed him all the treasures."

So we begun to gaze, and he begun to tell about it out of the Arabian
Nights.



CHAPTER X. THE TREASURE-HILL

TOM said it happened like this.

A dervish was stumping it along through the Desert, on foot, one blazing
hot day, and he had come a thousand miles and was pretty poor, and
hungry, and ornery and tired, and along about where we are now he run
across a camel-driver with a hundred camels, and asked him for some a'ms.
But the cameldriver he asked to be excused. The dervish said:

"Don't you own these camels?"

"Yes, they're mine."

"Are you in debt?"

"Who--me? No."

"Well, a man that owns a hundred camels and ain't in debt is rich--and
not only rich, but very rich. Ain't it so?"

The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then the dervish says:

"God has made you rich, and He has made me poor. He has His reasons, and
they are wise, blessed be His name. But He has willed that His rich shall
help His poor, and you have turned away from me, your brother, in my
need, and He will remember this, and you will lose by it."

That made the camel-driver feel shaky, but all the same he was born
hoggish after money and didn't like to let go a cent; so he begun to
whine and explain, and said times was hard, and although he had took a
full freight down to Balsora and got a fat rate for it, he couldn't git
no return freight, and so he warn't making no great things out of his
trip. So the dervish starts along again, and says:

"All right, if you want to take the risk; but I reckon you've made a
mistake this time, and missed a chance."

Of course the camel-driver wanted to know what kind of a chance he had
missed, because maybe there was money in it; so he run after the dervish,
and begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him that at last the
dervish gave in, and says:

"Do you see that hill yonder? Well, in that hill is all the treasures of
the earth, and I was looking around for a man with a particular good kind
heart and a noble, generous disposition, because if I could find just
that man, I've got a kind of a salve I could put on his eyes and he could
see the treasures and get them out."

So then the camel-driver was in a sweat; and he cried, and begged, and
took on, and went down on his knees, and said he was just that kind of a
man, and said he could fetch a thousand people that would say he wasn't
ever described so exact before.

"Well, then," says the dervish, "all right. If we load the hundred
camels, can I have half of them?"

The driver was so glad he couldn't hardly hold in, and says:

"Now you're shouting."

So they shook hands on the bargain, and the dervish got out his box and
rubbed the salve on the driver's right eye, and the hill opened and he
went in, and there, sure enough, was piles and piles of gold and jewels
sparkling like all the stars in heaven had fell down.

So him and the dervish laid into it, and they loaded every camel till he
couldn't carry no more; then they said good-bye, and each of them started
off with his fifty. But pretty soon the camel-driver come a-running and
overtook the dervish and says:

"You ain't in society, you know, and you don't really need all you've
got. Won't you be good, and let me have ten of your camels?"

"Well," the dervish says, "I don't know but what you say is reasonable
enough."

So he done it, and they separated and the dervish started off again with
his forty. But pretty soon here comes the camel-driver bawling after him
again, and whines and slobbers around and begs another ten off of him,
saying thirty camel loads of treasures was enough to see a dervish
through, because they live very simple, you know, and don't keep house,
but board around and give their note.

But that warn't the end yet. That ornery hound kept coming and coming
till he had begged back all the camels and had the whole hundred. Then he
was satisfied, and ever so grateful, and said he wouldn't ever forgit the
dervish as long as he lived, and nobody hadn't been so good to him
before, and liberal. So they shook hands good-bye, and separated and
started off again.

But do you know, it warn't ten minutes till the camel-driver was
unsatisfied again--he was the lowdownest reptyle in seven counties--and
he come 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.

"Why?" said the dervish.

"Oh, you know," says the driver.

"Know what?"

"Well, you can't fool me," says the driver. "You're trying to keep back
something from me, you know it mighty well. You know, I reckon, that if I
had the salve on the other eye I could see a lot more things that's
valuable. Come--please put it on."

The dervish says:

"I wasn't keeping anything back from you. I don't mind telling you what
would happen if I put it on. You'd never see again. You'd be stone-blind
the rest of your days."

But do you know that beat wouldn't believe him. No, he begged and begged,
and whined and cried, till at last the dervish opened his box and told
him to put it on, if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure enough he
was as blind as a bat in a minute.

Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him;
and says:

"Good-bye--a man that's blind hain't got no use for jewelry."

And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and left that man to wander
around poor and miserable and friendless the rest of his days in the
Desert.

Jim said he'd bet it was a lesson to him.

"Yes," Tom says, "and like a considerable many lessons a body gets. They
ain't no account, because the thing don't ever happen the same way
again--and can't. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly and crippled
his back for life, everybody said it would be a lesson to him. What kind
of a lesson? How was he going to use it? He couldn't climb chimblies no
more, and he hadn't no more backs to break."

"All de same, Mars Tom, dey IS sich a thing as learnin' by expe'ence. De
Good Book say de burnt chile shun de fire."

"Well, I ain't denying that a thing's a lesson if it's a thing that can
happen twice just the same way. There's lots of such things, and THEY
educate a person, that's what Uncle Abner always said; but there's forty
MILLION lots of the other kind--the kind that don't happen the same way
twice--and they ain't no real use, they ain't no more instructive than
the small-pox. When you've got it, it ain't no good to find out you ought
to been vaccinated, and it ain't no good to git vaccinated afterward,
because the small-pox don't come but once. But, on the other hand, Uncle
Abner said that the person that had took a bull by the tail once had
learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a
person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting
knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever
going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you, Jim, Uncle Abner was
down on them people that's all the time trying to dig a lesson out of
everything that happens, no matter whether--"

But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed, because you know a person
always feels bad when he is talking uncommon fine and thinks the other
person is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that way. Of
course he oughtn't to go to sleep, because it's shabby; but the finer a
person talks the certainer it is to make you sleep, and so when you come
to look at it it ain't nobody's fault in particular; both of them's to
blame.

Jim begun to snore--soft and blubbery at first, then a long rasp, then a
stronger one, then a half a dozen horrible ones like the last water
sucking down the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more power
to it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in, the way a cow does that
is choking to death; and when the person has got to that point he is at
his level best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block with a
dipperful of loddanum in him, but can't wake himself up although all that
awful noise of his'n ain't but three inches from his own ears. And that
is the curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you rake a match to
light the candle, and that little bit of a noise will fetch him. I wish I
knowed what was the reason of that, but there don't seem to be no way to
find out. Now there was Jim alarming the whole Desert, and yanking the
animals out, for miles and miles around, to see what in the nation was
going on up there; there warn't nobody nor nothing that was as close to
the noise as HE was, and yet he was the only cretur that wasn't disturbed
by it. We yelled at him and whooped at him, it never done no good; but
the first time there come a little wee noise that wasn't of a usual kind
it woke him up. No, sir, I've thought it all over, and so has Tom, and
there ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore.

Jim said he hadn't been asleep; he just shut his eyes so he could listen
better.

Tom said nobody warn't accusing him.

That made him look like he wished he hadn't said anything. And he wanted
to git away from the subject, I reckon, because he begun to abuse the
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:

"I ain't so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful liberal and good and
unselfish, but I don't quite see it. He didn't hunt up another poor
dervish, did he? No, he didn't. If he was so unselfish, why didn't he go
in there himself and take a pocketful of jewels and go along and be
satisfied? No, sir, the person he was hunting for was a man with a
hundred camels. He wanted to get away with all the treasure he could."

"Why, Mars Tom, he was willin' to divide, fair and square; he only struck
for fifty camels."

"Because he knowed how he was going to get all of them by and by."

"Mars Tom, he TOLE de man de truck would make him bline."

"Yes, because he knowed the man's character. It was just the kind of a
man he was hunting for--a man that never believes in anybody's word or
anybody's honorableness, because he ain't got none of his own. I reckon
there's lots of people like that dervish. They swindle, right and left,
but they always make the other person SEEM to swindle himself. They keep
inside of the letter of the law all the time, and there ain't no way to
git hold of them. THEY don't put the salve on--oh, no, that would be
sin; but they know how to fool YOU into putting it on, then it's you that
blinds yourself. I reckon the dervish and the camel-driver was just a
pair--a fine, smart, brainy rascal, and a dull, coarse, ignorant one, but
both of them rascals, just the same."

"Mars Tom, does you reckon dey's any o' dat kind o' salve in de worl'
now?"

"Yes, Uncle Abner says there is. He says they've got it in New York, and
they put it on country people's eyes and show them all the railroads in
the world, and they go in and git them, and then when they rub the salve
on the other eye the other man bids them goodbye and goes off with their
railroads. Here's the treasure-hill now. Lower away!"

We landed, but it warn't as interesting as I thought it was going to be,
because we couldn't find the place where they went in to git the
treasure. Still, it was plenty interesting enough, just to see the mere
hill itself where such a wonderful thing happened. Jim said he wou'dn't
'a' missed it for three dollars, and I felt the same way.

And to me and Jim, as wonderful a thing as any was the way Tom could come
into a strange big country like this and go straight and find a little
hump like that and tell it in a minute from a million other humps that
was almost just like it, and nothing to help him but only his own
learning and his own natural smartness. We talked and talked it over
together, but couldn't make out how he done it. He had the best head on
him I ever see; and all he lacked was age, to make a name for himself
equal to Captain Kidd or George Washington. I bet you it would 'a'
crowded either of THEM to find that hill, with all their gifts, but it
warn't nothing to Tom Sawyer; he went across Sahara and put his finger on
it as easy as you could pick a nigger out of a bunch of angels.

We found a pond of salt water close by and scraped up a raft of salt
around the edges, and loaded up the lion's skin and the tiger's so as
they would keep till Jim could tan them.



CHAPTER XI. THE SAND-STORM

WE went a-fooling along for a day or two, and then just as the full moon
was touching the ground on the other side of the desert, we see a string
of little black figgers moving across its big silver face. You could see
them as plain as if they was painted on the moon with ink. It was another
caravan. We cooled down our speed and tagged along after it, just to have
company, though it warn't going our way. It was a rattler, that caravan,
and a most bully sight to look at next morning when the sun come
a-streaming across the desert and flung the long shadders of the camels
on the gold sand like a thousand grand-daddy-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.

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.

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: