Following the Equator: A Journey Around the WorldTwain, Mark
General
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
Twain, Mark
Equator -- Description and travel; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 -- Travel; Voyages around the world
But now that he was gone, and was off my mind and heart, my spirits began
to rise at once, and I was soon feeling brisk and ready to go out and
have adventures. Then his newly-hired successor flitted in, touched his
forehead, and began to fly around here, there, and everywhere, on his
velvet feet, and in five minutes he had everything in the room
“ship-shape and Bristol fashion,” as the sailors say, and was standing at
the salute, waiting for orders. Dear me, what a rustler he was after the
slumbrous way of Manuel, poor old slug! All my heart, all my affection,
all my admiration, went out spontaneously to this frisky little forked
black thing, this compact and compressed incarnation of energy and force
and promptness and celerity and confidence, this smart, smily, engaging,
shiney-eyed little devil, feruled on his upper end by a gleaming
fire-coal of a fez with a red-hot tassel dangling from it. I said,
with deep satisfaction—
“You'll suit. What is your name?”
He reeled it mellowly off.
“Let me see if I can make a selection out of it—for business uses, I
mean; we will keep the rest for Sundays. Give it to me in installments.”
He did it. But there did not seem to be any short ones, except
Mousa—which suggested mouse. It was out of character; it was too soft,
too quiet, too conservative; it didn't fit his splendid style. I
considered, and said—
“Mousa is short enough, but I don't quite like it. It seems colorless
—inharmonious—inadequate; and I am sensitive to such things. How do
you
think Satan would do?”
“Yes, master. Satan do wair good.”
It was his way of saying “very good.”
There was a rap at the door. Satan covered the ground with a single
skip; there was a word or two of Hindostani, then he disappeared. Three
minutes later he was before me again, militarily erect, and waiting for
me to speak first.
“What is it, Satan?”
“God want to see you.”
“Who?”
“God. I show him up, master?”
“Why, this is so unusual, that—that—well, you see indeed I am so
unprepared—I don't quite know what I do mean. Dear me, can't you
explain? Don't you see that this is a most ex——”
“Here his card, master.”
Wasn't it curious—and amazing, and tremendous, and all that? Such a
personage going around calling on such as I, and sending up his card,
like a mortal—sending it up by Satan. It was a bewildering collision of
the impossibles. But this was the land of the Arabian Nights, this was
India! and what is it that cannot happen in India?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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