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

that, but you'd have the dickens's own time to find it again the next time
you wanted it. And look at Russia. It spreads all around and everywhere,
and yet ain't no more important in this world than Rhode Island is, and
hasn't got half as much in it that's worth saving." Away off now we see a
little hill, a-standing up just on the edge of the world. Tom broke off
his talk, and reached for a glass very much excited, and took a look, and
says:
"That's it-it's the one I've been looking for, sure. If I'm right, it's
the one the dervish took the man into and showed him all the treasures."
So we begun to gaze, and he begun to tell about it out of the Arabian
Nights.


Chapter X. THE TREASURE-HILL


TOM said it happened like this.
A dervish was stumping it along through the Desert, on foot, one
blazing hot day, and he had come a thousand miles and was pretty poor, and
hungry, and ornery and tired, and along about where we are now he run
across a camel-driver with a hundred camels, and asked him for some a'ms.
But the cameldriver he asked to be excused. The dervish said:
"Don't you own these camels?"
"Yes, they're mine."
"Are you in debt?"
"Who-me? No."
"Well, a man that owns a hundred camels and ain't in debt is rich-and
not only rich, but very rich. Ain't it so?"
The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then the dervish says:
"God has made you rich, and He has made me poor. He has His reasons,
and they are wise, blessed be His name. But He has willed that His rich
shall help His poor, and you have turned away from me, your brother, in my
need, and He will remember this, and you will lose by it."
That made the camel-driver feel shaky, but all the same he was born
hoggish after money and didn't like to let go a cent; so he begun to whine
and explain, and said times was hard, and although he had took a full
freight down to Balsora and got a fat rate for it, he couldn't git no
return freight, and so he warn't making no great things out of his trip.
So the dervish starts along again, and says:
"All right, if you want to take the risk; but I reckon you've made a
mistake this time, and missed a chance."
Of course the camel-driver wanted to know what kind of a chance he had
missed, because maybe there was money in it; so he run after the dervish,
and begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him that at last the
dervish gave in, and says:
"Do you see that hill yonder? Well, in that hill is all the treasures
of the earth, and I was looking around for a man with a particular good
kind heart and a noble, generous disposition, because if I could find just
that man, I've got a kind of a salve I could put on his eyes and he could
see the treasures and get them out."