Adventure stories; Americans -- Foreign countries -- Fiction; Balloon ascensions -- Fiction; Sawyer, Tom (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
And moreover, besides, the thing they always said about them seemed to
me to be stretchers. There was a feller come to the Sunday-school once,
and had a picture of them, and made a speech, and said the biggest
pyramid covered thirteen acres, and was most five hundred foot high,
just a steep mountain, all built out of hunks of stone as big as a
bureau, and laid up in perfectly regular layers, like stair-steps.
Thirteen acres, you see, for just one building; it’s a farm. If it
hadn’t been in Sunday-school, I would ’a’ judged it was a lie; and
outside I was certain of it. And he said there was a hole in the
pyramid, and you could go in there with candles, and go ever so far up
a long slanting tunnel, and come to a large room in the stomach of that
stone mountain, and there you would find a big stone chest with a king
in it, four thousand years old. I said to myself, then, if that ain’t a
lie I will eat that king if they will fetch him, for even Methusalem
warn’t that old, and nobody claims it.
As we come a little nearer we see the yaller sand come to an end in a
long straight edge like a blanket, and on to it was joined, edge to
edge, a wide country of bright green, with a snaky stripe crooking
through it, and Tom said it was the Nile. It made my heart jump again,
for the Nile was another thing that wasn’t real to me. Now I can tell
you one thing which is dead certain: if you will fool along over three
thousand miles of yaller sand, all glimmering with heat so that it
makes your eyes water to look at it, and you’ve been a considerable
part of a week doing it, the green country will look so like home and
heaven to you that it will make your eyes water _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 fitten’ for a humble
poor nigger to come any other way where such men had been as Moses and
Joseph and Pharaoh and the other prophets. He was a Presbyterian, and
had a most deep respect for Moses which was a Presbyterian, too, he
said. He was all stirred up, and says:
“Hit’s de lan’ of Egypt, de lan’ of Egypt, en I’s ’lowed to look at it
wid my own eyes! En dah’s de river dat was turn’ to blood, en I’s
looking at de very same groun’ whah de plagues was, en de lice, en de
frogs, en de locus’, en de hail, en whah dey marked de door-pos’, en de
angel o’ de Lord come by in de darkness o’ de night en slew de
fust-born in all de lan’ o’ Egypt. Ole Jim ain’t worthy to see dis
day!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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