wretched and miserable all down the other. It is most
seldom that a person feels so mixed like that; and it is
not to be recommended, either.
Tom asked me what he’d better do, but I didn’t
know. He asked me if I could hold on whilst he sailed
away to a safe place and left the lion behind. I said I
could if he didn’t go no higher than he was now; but
if he went higher I would lose my head and fall, sure.
So he said, “Take a good grip,” and he started.
“Don’t go so fast,” I shouted. “It makes my
head swim.”
He had started like a lightning express. He slowed
down, and we glided over the sand slower, but still in
a kind of sickening way; for it IS uncomfortable to see
things sliding and gliding under you like that, and not
a sound.
But pretty soon there was plenty of sound, for the
lion was catching up. His noise fetched others. You
could see them coming on the lope from every direc-
tion, and pretty soon there was a couple of dozen of
them under me, jumping up at the ladder and snarling
and snapping at each other; and so we went skimming
along over the sand, and these fellers doing what they
could to help us to not forgit the occasion; and then
some other beasts come, without an invite, and they
started a regular riot down there.
We see this plan was a mistake. We couldn’t ever
git away from them at this gait, and I couldn’t hold on
forever. So Tom took a think, and struck another
idea. That was, to kill a lion with the pepper-box
revolver, and then sail away while the others stopped
to fight over the carcass. So he stopped the balloon
still, and done it, and then we sailed off while the fuss
was going on, and come down a quarter of a mile off,
and they helped me aboard; but by the time we was
out of reach again, that gang was on hand once more.
And when they see we was really gone and they
couldn’t get us, they sat down on their hams and
looked up at us so kind of disappointed that it was as
much as a person could do not to see THEIR side of the
matter.
CHAPTER VI.
IT’S A CARAVAN
I WAS so weak that the only thing I wanted was a
chance to lay down, so I made straight for my
locker-bunk, and stretched myself out there. But a
body couldn’t get back his strength in no such oven as
that, so Tom give the command to soar, and Jim
started her aloft.
We had to go up a mile before we struck comfort-
able weather where it was breezy and pleasant and just
right, and pretty soon I was all straight again. Tom
had been setting quiet and thinking; but now he jumps
up and says:
“I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are.
We’re in the Great Sahara, as sure as guns!”
He was so excited he couldn’t hold still; but I
wasn’t. I says:
“Well, then, where’s the Great Sahara? In Eng-
land 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 be-
lieve 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 some-
wheres, if he had thought of one thing; and when we
asked him what, he said:
“These clocks. They’re chronometers. You al-
ways 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,