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

Chapter XII. JIM STANDING SIEGE


THE next few meals was pretty sandy, but that don't make no difference
when you are hungry; and when you ain't it ain't no satisfaction to eat,
anyway, and so a little grit in the meat ain't no particular drawback, as
far as I can see.
Then we struck the east end of the Desert at last, sailing on a
northeast course. Away off on the edge of the sand, in a soft pinky light,
we see three little sharp roofs like tents, and Tom says:
"It's the pyramids of Egypt."
It made my heart fairly jump. You see, I had seen a many and a many a
picture of them, and heard tell about them a hundred times, and yet to
come on them all of a sudden, that way, and find they was REAL, 'stead of
imaginations, 'most knocked the breath out of me with surprise. It's a
curious thing, that the more you hear about a grand and big and bully
thing or person, the more it kind of dreamies out, as you may say, and
gets to be a big dim wavery figger made out of moonshine and nothing solid
to it. It's just so with George Washington, and the same with them
pyramids.
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