us. He was always the gratefulest nigger I ever see, for any little
thing you done for him. He was only nigger outside; inside he was as
white as you be.

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
th