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.
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