"Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

could see Tom was souring up pretty fast over the way it flatted out and
the way Jim had popped on to the weak place in it, and I don't think it's
fair for everybody to pile on to a feller when he's down. But Tom he
whirls on me and says:
"What do YOU think of the tale?"
Of course, then, I had to come out and make a clean breast and say it
did seem to me, too, same as it did to Jim, that as long as the tale
stopped square in the middle and never got to no place, it really warn't
worth the trouble of telling.
Tom's chin dropped on his breast, and 'stead of being mad, as I
reckoned he'd be, to hear me scoff at his tale that way, he seemed to be
only sad; and he says:
"Some people can see, and some can't-just as that man said. Let alone a
camel, if a cyclone had gone by, YOU duffers wouldn't 'a' noticed the
track."
I don't know what he meant by that, and he didn't say; it was just one
of his irrulevances, I reckon-he was full of them, sometimes, when he was
in a close place and couldn't see no other way out-but I didn't mind. We'd
spotted the soft place in that tale sharp enough, he couldn't git away
from that little fact. It graveled him like the nation, too, I reckon,
much as he tried not to let on.


Chapter VIII. THE DISAPPEARING LAKE


WE had an early breakfast in the morning, and set looking down on the
desert, and the weather was ever so bammy and lovely, although we warn't
high up. You have to come down lower and lower after sundown in the
desert, because it cools off so fast; and so, by the time it is getting
toward dawn, you are skimming along only a little ways above the sand.
We was watching the shadder of the balloon slide along the ground, and
now and then gazing off across the desert to see if anything was stirring,
and then down on the shadder again, when all of a sudden almost right
under us we see a lot of men and camels laying scattered about, perfectly
quiet, like they was asleep.
We shut off the power, and backed up and stood over them, and then we
see that they was all dead. It give us the cold shivers. And it made us
hush down, too, and talk low, like people at a funeral. We dropped down
slow and stopped, and me and Tom clumb down and went among them. There was
men, and women, and children. They was dried by the sun and dark and
shriveled and leathery, like the pictures of mummies you see in books. And
yet they looked just as human, you wouldn't 'a' believed it; just like
they was asleep.
Some of the people and animals was partly covered with sand, but most
of them not, for the sand was thin there, and the bed was gravel and hard.
Most of the clothes had rotted away; and when you took hold of a rag, it
tore with a touch, like spiderweb. Tom reckoned they had been laying there
for years.
Some of the men had rusty guns by them, some had swords on and had