, for
hundreds of years, maybe thousands, but they had just lately dug the
sand away and found that little temple. It took a power of sand to bury
that cretur; most as much as it would to bury a steamboat, I reckon.

We landed Jim on top of the head, with an American flag to protect him,
it being a foreign land; then we sailed off to this and that and
t'other distance, to git what Tom called effects and perspectives
and proportions, and Jim he done the best he could, striking all the
different kinds of attitudes and positions he could study up, but
standing on his head and working his legs the way a frog does was the
best. The further we got away, the littler Jim got, and the grander
the Sphinx got, till at last it was only a clothespin on a dome, as
you might say. That's the way perspective brings out the correct
proportions, Tom said; he said Julus Cesar's niggers didn't know how big
he was, they was too close to him.

Then we sailed off further and further, till we couldn't see Jim at all
any more, and then that great figger was at its noblest, a-gazing out
over the Nile Valley so still and solemn and lonesome, and all the
little shabby huts and things that was scattered about it clean
disappeared and gone, and nothing around it now but a soft wide spread
of yaller velvet, which was the sand.

That was the right place to stop, and we done it. We set there a-looking
and a-thinking for a half an hour, nobody a-saying anything, for it made
us feel quiet and kind of solemn to remember it had been looking over
that valley just that same way, and thinking its awful thoughts all to
itself for thousands of years, and nobody can't find out what they are
to this day.

At last I took up the glass and see some little black things a-capering
around on that velvet carpet, and some more a-climbing up the cretur's
back, and then I see two or three wee puffs of white smoke, and told Tom
to look. He done it, and says:

"They're bugs. No--hold on; they--why, I believe they're men. Yes, it's
men--men and horses both. They're hauling a long ladder up onto the
Sphinx's back--now ain't that odd? And now they're trying to lean it
up a--there's some more puffs of smoke--it's guns! Huck, they're after
Jim."

We clapped on the power, and went for them a-biling. We was there in
no time, and come a-whizzing down amongst them, and they broke and
scattered every which way, and some that was climbing the ladder after
Jim let go all holts an