IT’S A CARAVAN
I was so weak that the only thing I wanted was a chance to lay down, so
I made straight for my locker-bunk, and stretched myself out there. But
a body couldn’t get back his strength in no such oven as that, so Tom
give the command to soar, and Jim started her aloft.
We had to go up a mile before we struck comfortable weather where it
was breezy and pleasant and just right, and pretty soon I was all
straight again. Tom had been setting quiet and thinking; but now he
jumps up and says:
“I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are. We’re in the Great
Sahara, as sure as guns!”
He was so excited he couldn’t hold still; but I wasn’t. I says:
“Well, then, where’s the Great Sahara? In England or in Scotland?”
“’Tain’t in either; it’s in Africa.”
Jim’s eyes bugged out, and he begun to stare down with no end of
interest, because that was where his originals come from; but I didn’t
more than half believe it. I couldn’t, you know; it seemed too awful
far away for us to have traveled.
But Tom was full of his discovery, as he called it, and said the lions
and the sand meant the Great Desert, sure. He said he could ’a’ found
out, before we sighted land, that we was crowding the land somewheres,
if he had thought of one thing; and when we asked him what, he said:
“These clocks. They’re chronometers. You always read about them in sea
voyages. One of them is keeping Grinnage time, and the other is keeping
St. Louis time, like my watch. When we left St. Louis it was four in
the afternoon by my watch and this clock, and it was ten at night by
this Grinnage clock. Well, at this time of the year the sun sets at
about seven o’clock. Now I noticed the time yesterday evening when the
sun went down, and it was half-past five o’clock by the Grinnage clock,
and half past 11 A.M. by my watch and the other clock. You see, the sun
rose and set by my watch in St. Louis, and the Grinnage clock was six
hours fast; but we’ve come so far east that it comes within less than
half an hour of setting by the Grinnage clock now, and I’m away
out—more than four hours and a half out. You see, that meant that we
was closing up on the longitude of Ireland, and would strike it before
long if we was p’inted right—which we wasn’t. No, sir, we’ve been
a-wandering—wandering ’way down south of east, and it’s my opinion we
are in Africa. Look at this map. You see how the shoulder of Africa
sticks out to the west. Think how fast we’ve traveled; if we had gone
straight east we would be long past England by this time. You watch for
noon, all of you, and we’ll stand up, and when we can’t cast a shadow
we’ll find that this Grinnage clock is coming mighty close to marking
twelve. Yes, sir, I think we’re in Africa; and it’s just bully.”
Jim was gazing down with the glass. He shook his head and says:
“Mars Tom, I reckon dey’s a mistake som’er’s, hain’t seen no niggers
yit.”
“That’s nothing; they don’t live in the desert. What is that, ’way off
yonder? Gimme a glass.”
He took a long look, and said it was like a black string stretched
across the sand, but he couldn’t guess what it was.
“Well,” I says, “I reckon maybe you’ve got a chance now to find out
whereabouts this balloon is, because as like as not that is one of
these lines here, that’s on the map, that you call meridians of
longitude, and we can drop down and look at its number, and—”
“Oh, shucks, Huck Finn, I never see such a lunkhead as you. Did you
s’pose there’s meridians of longitude on the _earth?_”
“Tom Sawyer, they’re set down on the map, and you know it perfectly
well, and here they are, and you can see for yourself.”
“Of course they’re on the map, but that’s nothing; there ain’t any on
the _ground_.”
“Tom, do you know that to be so?”
“Certainly I do.”
“Well, then, that map’s a liar again. I never see such a liar as that
map.”
He fired up at that, and I was ready for him, and Jim was warming his
opinion, too, and next minute we’d ’a’ broke loose on another argument,
if Tom hadn’t dropped the glass and begun to clap his hands like a
maniac and sing out:
“Camels!—Camels!”
So I grabbed a glass and Jim, too, and took a look, but I was
disappointed, and says:
“Camels your granny; they’re spiders.”
“Spiders in a desert, you shad? Spiders walking in a procession? You
don’t ever reflect, Huck Finn, and I reckon you really haven’t got
anything to reflect _with_. Don’t you know we’re as much as a mile up
in the air, and that that string of crawlers is two or three miles
away? Spiders, good land! Spiders as big as a cow? Perhaps you’d like
to go down and milk one of ’em. But they’re camels, just the same. It’s
a caravan, that’s what it is, and it’s a mile long.”
“Well, then, let’s go down and look at it. I don’t believe in it, and
ain’t going to till I see it and know it.”
“All right,” he says, and give the command:
“Lower away.”
As we come slanting down into the hot weather, we could see that it was
camels, sure enough, plodding along, an everlasting string of them,
with bales strapped to them, and several hundred men in long white
robes, and a thing like a shawl bound over their heads and hanging down
with tassels and fringes; and some of the men had long guns and some
hadn’t, and some was riding and some was walking. And the weather—well,
it was just roasting. And how slow they did creep along! We swooped
down now, all of a sudden, and stopped about a hundred yards over their
heads.
[Illustration: “We swooped down, now, all of a sudden”]
The men all set up a yell, and some of them fell flat on their
stomachs, some begun to fire their guns at us, and the rest broke and
scampered every which way, and so did the camels.
We see that we was making trouble, so we went up again about a mile, to
the cool weather, and watched them from there. It took them an hour to
get together and form the procession again; then they started along,
but we could see by the glasses that they wasn’t paying much attention
to anything but us. We poked along, looking down at them with the
glasses, and by and by we see a big sand mound, and something like
people the other side of it, and there was something like a man laying
on top of the mound that raised his head up every now and then, and
seemed to be watching the caravan or us, we didn’t know which. As the
caravan got nearer, he sneaked down on the other side and rushed to the
other men and horses—for that is what they was—and we see them mount in
a hurry; and next, here they come, like a house afire, some with lances
and some with long guns, and all of them yelling the best they could.
They come a-tearing down on to the caravan, and the next minute both
sides crashed together and was all mixed up, and there was such another
popping of guns as you never heard, and the air got so full of smoke
you could only catch glimpses of them struggling together. There must
’a’ been six hundred men in that battle, and it was terrible to see.
Then they broke up into gangs and groups, fighting tooth and nail, and
scurrying and scampering around, and laying into each other like
everything; and whenever the smoke cleared a little you could see dead
and wounded people and camels scattered far and wide and all about, and
camels racing off in every direction.
[Illustration: “The last man to go snatched up a child, and carried it
off in front of him on his horse”]
At last the robbers see they couldn’t win, so their chief sounded a
signal, and all that was left of them broke away and went scampering
across the plain. The last man to go snatched up a child and carried it
off in front of him on his horse, and a woman run screaming and begging
after him, and followed him away off across the plain till she was
separated a long ways from her people; but it warn’t no use, and she
had to give it up, and we see her sink down on the sand and cover her
face with her hands. Then Tom took the hellum, and started for that
yahoo, and we come a-whizzing down and made a swoop, and knocked him
out of the saddle, child and all; and he was jarred considerable, but
the child wasn’t hurt, but laid there working its hands and legs in the
air like a tumble-bug that’s on its back and can’t turn over. The man
went staggering off to overtake his horse, and didn’t know what had hit
him, for we was three or four hundred yards up in the air by this time.
[Illustration: “We come a-whizzing down, and made a swoop, and knocked
him out of the saddle, child and all”]
We judged the woman would go and get the child now; but she didn’t. We
could see her, through the glass, still setting there, with her head
bowed down on her knees; so of course she hadn’t seen the performance,
and thought her child was clean gone with the man. She was nearly a
half a mile from her people, so we thought we might go down to the
child, which was about a quarter of a mile beyond her, and snake it to
her before the caravan people could git to us to do us any harm; and
besides, we reckoned they had enough business on their hands for one
while, anyway, with the wounded. We thought we’d chance it, and we did.
We swooped down and stopped, and Jim shinned down the ladder and
fetched up the kid, which was a nice fat little thing, and in a noble
good humor, too, considering it was just out of a battle and been
tumbled off of a horse; and then we started for the mother, and stopped
back of her and tolerable near by, and Jim slipped down and crept up
easy, and when he was close back of her the child goo-goo’d, the way a
child does, and she heard it, and whirled and fetched a shriek of joy,
and made a jump for the kid and snatched it and hugged it, and dropped
it and hugged Jim, and then snatched off a gold chain and hung it
around Jim’s neck, and hugged him again, and jerked up the child again,
a-sobbing and glorifying all the time; and Jim he shoved for the ladder
and up it, and in a minute we was back up in the sky and the woman was
staring up, with the back of her head between her shoulders and the
child with its arms locked around her neck. And there she stood, as
long as we was in sight a-sailing away in the sky.