Tom Sawyer Abroad: Chapter 13

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 clumb down to the hole where you go into the tunnel, and
went in with some Arabs and candles, and away in there in the middle of
the pyramid we found a room and a big stone box in it where they used to
keep that king, just as the man in the Sunday-school said; but he was
gone, now; somebody had got him. But I didn't take no interest in the
place, because there could be ghosts there, of course; not fresh ones,
but I don't like no kind.

So then we come out and got some little donkeys and rode a piece, and
then went in a boat another piece, and then more donkeys, and got to
Cairo; and all the way the road was as smooth and beautiful a road as
ever I see, and had tall date-pa'ms on both sides, and naked children
everywhere, and the men was as red as copper, and fine and strong and
handsome. And the city was a curiosity. Such narrow streets--why, they
were just lanes, and crowded with people with turbans, and women with
veils, and everybody rigged out in blazing bright clothes and all sorts
of colors, and you wondered how the camels and the people got by each
other in such narrow little cracks, but they done it--a perfect jam, you
see, and everybody noisy. The stores warn't big enough to turn around in,
but you didn't have to go in; the storekeeper sat tailor fashion on his
counter, smoking his snaky long pipe, and had his things where he could
reach them to sell, and he was just as good as in the street, for the
camel-loads brushed him as they went by.

Now and then a grand person flew by in a carriage with fancy dressed men
running and yelling in front of it and whacking anybody with a long rod
that didn't get out of the way. And by and by along comes the Sultan
riding horseback at the head of a procession, and fairly took your breath
away his clothes was so splendid; and everybody fell flat and laid on his
stomach while he went by. I forgot, but a feller helped me to remember.
He was one that had a rod and run in front.

There was churches, but they don't know enough to keep Sunday; they keep
Friday and break the Sabbath. You have to take off your shoes when you go
in. There was crowds of men and boys in the church, setting in groups on
the stone floor and making no end of noise--getting their lessons by
heart, Tom said, out of the Koran, which they think is a Bible, and
people that knows better knows enough to not let on. I never see such a
big church in my life before, and most awful high, it was; it made you
dizzy to look up; our village church at home ain't a circumstance to it;
if you was to put it in there, people would think it was a drygoods box.

What I wanted to see was a dervish, because I was interested in dervishes
on accounts of the one that played the trick on the camel-driver. So we
found a lot in a kind of a church, and they called themselves Whirling
Dervishes; and they did whirl, too. I never see anything like it. They
had tall sugar-loaf hats on, and linen petticoats; and they spun and spun
and spun, round and round like tops, and the petticoats stood out on a
slant, and it was the prettiest thing I ever see, and made me drunk to
look at it. They was all Moslems, Tom said, and when I asked him what a
Moslem was, he said it was a person that wasn't a Presbyterian. So there
is plenty of them in Missouri, though I didn't know it before.

We didn't see half there was to see in Cairo, because Tom was in such a
sweat to hunt out places that was celebrated in history. We had a most
tiresome time to find the granary where Joseph stored up the grain before
the famine, and when we found it it warn't worth much to look at, being
such an old tumble-down wreck; but Tom was satisfied, and made more fuss
over it than I would make if I stuck a nail in my foot. How he ever found
that place was too many for me. We passed as much as forty just like it
before we come to it, and any of them would 'a' done for me, but none but
just the right one would suit him; I never see anybody so particular as
Tom Sawyer. The minute he struck the right one he reconnized it as easy
as I would reconnize my other shirt if I had one, but how he done it he
couldn't any more tell than he could fly; he said so himself.

Then we hunted a long time for the house where the boy lived that learned
the cadi how to try the case of the old olives and the new ones, and said
it was out of the Arabian Nights, and he would tell me and Jim about it
when he got time. Well, we hunted and hunted till I was ready to drop,
and I wanted Tom to give it up and come next day and git somebody that
knowed the town and could talk Missourian and could go straight to the
place; but no, he wanted to find it himself, and nothing else would
answer. So on we went. Then at last the remarkablest thing happened I
ever see. The house was gone--gone hundreds of years ago--every last rag
of it gone but just one mud brick. Now a person wouldn't ever believe
that a backwoods Missouri boy that hadn't ever been in that town before
could go and hunt that place over and find that brick, but Tom Sawyer
done it. I know he done it, because I see him do it. I was right by his
very side at the time, and see him see the brick and see him reconnize
it. Well, I says to myself, how DOES he do it? Is it knowledge, or is it
instink?

Now there's the facts, just as they happened: let everybody explain it
their own way. I've ciphered over it a good deal, and it's my opinion
that some of it is knowledge but the main bulk of it is instink. The
reason is this: Tom put the brick in his pocket to give to a museum with
his name on it and the facts when he went home, and I slipped it out and
put another brick considerable like it in its place, and he didn't know
the difference--but there was a difference, you see. I think that settles
it--it's mostly instink, not knowledge. Instink tells him where the exact
PLACE is for the brick to be in, and so he reconnizes it by the place
it's in, not by the look of the brick. If it was knowledge, not instink,
he would know the brick again by the look of it the next time he seen
it--which he didn't. So it shows that for all the brag you hear about
knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth forty of it for
real unerringness. Jim says the same.

When we got back Jim dropped down and took us in, and there was a young
man there with a red skullcap and tassel on and a beautiful silk jacket
and baggy trousers with a shawl around his waist and pistols in it that
could talk English and wanted to hire to us as guide and take us to Mecca
and Medina and Central Africa and everywheres for a half a dollar a day
and his keep, and we hired him and left, and piled on the power, and by
the time we was through dinner we was over the place where the Israelites
crossed the Red Sea when Pharaoh tried to overtake them and was caught by
the waters. We stopped, then, and had a good look at the place, and it
done Jim good to see it. He said he could see it all, now, just the way
it happened; he could see the Israelites walking along between the walls
of water, and the Egyptians coming, from away off yonder, hurrying all
they could, and see them start in as the Israelites went out, and then
when they was all in, see the walls tumble together and drown the last
man of them. Then we piled on the power again and rushed away and
huvvered over Mount Sinai, and saw the place where Moses broke the tables
of stone, and where the children of Israel camped in the plain and
worshiped the golden calf, and it was all just as interesting as could
be, and the guide knowed every place as well as I knowed the village at
home.

But we had an accident, now, and it fetched all the plans to a
standstill. Tom's old ornery corn-cob pipe had got so old and swelled and
warped that she couldn't hold together any longer, notwithstanding the
strings and bandages, but caved in and went to pieces. Tom he didn't know
WHAT to do. The professor's pipe wouldn't answer; it warn't anything but
a mershum, and a person that's got used to a cob pipe knows it lays a
long ways over all the other pipes in this world, and you can't git him
to smoke any other. He wouldn't take mine, I couldn't persuade him. So
there he was.

He thought it over, and said we must scour around and see if we could
roust out one in Egypt or Arabia or around in some of these countries,
but the guide said no, it warn't no use, they didn't have them. So Tom
was pretty glum for a little while, then he chirked up and said he'd got
the idea and knowed what to do. He says:

"I've got another corn-cob pipe, and it's a prime one, too, and nearly
new. It's laying on the rafter that's right over the kitchen stove at
home in the village. Jim, you and the guide will go and get it, and me
and Huck will camp here on Mount Sinai till you come back."

"But, Mars Tom, we couldn't ever find de village. I could find de pipe,
'case I knows de kitchen, but my lan', we can't ever find de village, nur
Sent Louis, nur none o' dem places. We don't know de way, Mars Tom."

That was a fact, and it stumped Tom for a minute. Then he said:

"Looky here, it can be done, sure; and I'll tell you how. You set your
compass and sail west as straight as a dart, till you find the United
States. It ain't any trouble, because it's the first land you'll strike
the other side of the Atlantic. If it's daytime when you strike it, bulge
right on, straight west from the upper part of the Florida coast, and in
an hour and three quarters you'll hit the mouth of the Mississippi--at
the speed that I'm going to send you. You'll be so high up in the air
that the earth will be curved considerable--sorter like a washbowl turned
upside down--and you'll see a raft of rivers crawling around every which
way, long before you get there, and you can pick out the Mississippi
without any trouble. Then you can follow the river north nearly, an hour
and three quarters, till you see the Ohio come in; then you want to look
sharp, because you're getting near. Away up to your left you'll see
another thread coming in--that's the Missouri and is a little above St.
Louis. You'll come down low then, so as you can examine the villages as
you spin along. You'll pass about twenty-five in the next fifteen
minutes, and you'll recognize ours when you see it--and if you don't, you
can yell down and ask."

"Ef it's dat easy, Mars Tom, I reckon we kin do it--yassir, I knows we
kin."

The guide was sure of it, too, and thought that he could learn to stand
his watch in a little while.

"Jim can learn you the whole thing in a half an hour," Tom said. "This
balloon's as easy to manage as a canoe."

Tom got out the chart and marked out the course and measured it, and
says:

"To go back west is the shortest way, you see. It's only about seven
thousand miles. If you went east, and so on around, it's over twice as
far." Then he says to the guide, "I want you both to watch the tell-tale
all through the watches, and whenever it don't mark three hundred miles
an hour, you go higher or drop lower till you find a storm-current that's
going your way. There's a hundred miles an hour in this old thing without
any wind to help. There's 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 p'ison cold, but most of the time you'll find your storm a good
deal lower. If you can only strike a cyclone--that's the ticket for you!
You'll see by the professor's books that they travel west in these
latitudes; and they travel low, too."

Then he ciphered on the time, and says--

"Seven thousand miles, three hundred miles an hour--you can make the trip
in a day--twenty-four hours. This is Thursday; you'll be back here
Saturday afternoon. Come, now, hustle out some blankets and food and
books and things for me and Huck, and you can start right along. There
ain't no occasion to fool around--I want a smoke, and the quicker you
fetch that pipe the better."

All hands jumped for the things, and in eight minutes our things was out
and the balloon was ready for America. So we shook hands good-bye, and
Tom gave his last orders:

"It's 10 minutes to 2 P.M. now, Mount Sinai time. In 24 hours you'll be
home, and it'll be 6 to-morrow morning, village time. When you strike the
village, land a little back of the top of the hill, in the woods, out of
sight; then you rush down, Jim, and shove these letters in the
post-office, and if you see anybody stirring, pull your slouch down over
your face so they won't know you. Then you go and slip in the back way to
the kitchen and git the pipe, and lay this piece of paper on the kitchen
table, and put something on it to hold it, and then slide out and git
away, and don't let Aunt Polly catch a sight of you, nor nobody else.
Then you jump for the balloon and shove for Mount Sinai three hundred
miles an hour. You won't have lost more than an hour. You'll start back
at 7 or 8 A.M., village time, and be here in 24 hours, arriving at 2 or 3
P.M., Mount Sinai time."

Tom he read the piece of paper to us. He had wrote on it:

"THURSDAY AFTERNOON. Tom Sawyer the Erro-nort
sends his love to Aunt Polly from Mount Sinai
where the Ark was, and so does Huck Finn, and she
will get it to-morrow morning half-past six." *

[* This misplacing of the Ark is probably Huck's error, not
Tom's.--M.T.]

"That'll make her eyes bulge out and the tears come," he says. Then he
says:

"Stand by! One--two--three--away you go!"

And away she DID go! Why, she seemed to whiz out of sight in a second.

Then we found a most comfortable cave that looked out over the whole big
plain, and there we camped to wait for the pipe.

The balloon come hack all right, and brung the pipe; but Aunt Polly had
catched Jim when he was getting it, and anybody can guess what happened:
she sent for Tom. So Jim he says:

"Mars Tom, she's out on de porch wid her eye sot on de sky a-layin' for
you, en she say she ain't gwyne to budge from dah tell she gits hold of
you. Dey's gwyne to be trouble, Mars Tom, 'deed dey is."

So then we shoved for home, and not feeling very gay, neither.

END.

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