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
and Pharaoh and the other prophets.
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