but they done it--a perfect jam, you
see, and everybody noisy. The stores warn't big enough to turn around in,
but you didn't have to go in; the storekeeper sat tailor fashion on his
counter, smoking his snaky long pipe, and had his things where he could
reach them to sell, and he was just as good as in the street, for the
camel-loads brushed him as they went by.

Now and then a grand person flew by in a carriage with fancy dressed men
running and yelling in front of it and whacking anybody with a long rod
that didn't get out of the way. And by and by along comes the Sultan
riding horseback at the head of a procession, and fairly took your breath
away his clothes was so splendid; and everybody fell flat and laid on his
stomach while he went by. I forgot, but a feller helped me to remember.
He was one that had a rod and run in front.

There was churches, but they don't know enough to keep Sunday; they keep
Friday and break the Sabbath. You have to take off your shoes when you go
in. There was crowds of men and boys in the church, setting in groups on
the stone floor and making no end of noise--getting their lessons by
heart, Tom said, out of the Koran, which they think is a Bible, and
people that knows better knows enough to not let on. I never see such a
big church in my life before, and most awful high, it was; it made you
dizzy to look up; our village church at home ain't a circumstance to it;
if you was to put it in there, people would think it was a drygoods box.

What I wanted to see was a dervish, because I was interested in dervishes
on accounts of the one that played the trick on the camel-driver. So we
found a lot in a kind of a church, and they called themselves Whirling
Dervishes; and they did whirl, too. I never see anything like it. They
had tall sugar-loaf hats on, and linen petticoats; and they spun and spun
and spun, round and round like tops, and the petticoats stood out on a
slant, and it was the prettiest thing I ever see, and made me drunk to
look at it. They was all Moslems, Tom said, and when I asked him what a
Moslem was, he said it was a person that wasn't a Presbyterian. So there
is plenty of them in Missouri, though I didn't know it before.

We didn't see half there was to see in Cairo, because Tom was in such a
sweat to hunt out places that was celebrated in history. We had a most
tiresome time to find the granary where Joseph stored up the grain before
the famine, and when we found it it w