China’s vest-pocket; and not only that, but you’d
have the dickens’s own time to find it again the next
time you wanted it. And look at Russia. It spreads
all around and everywhere, and yet ain’t no more im-
portant in this world than Rhode Island is, and hasn’t
got half as much in it that’s worth saving.”
Away off now we see a little hill, a-standing up just
on the edge of the world. Tom broke off his talk, and
reached for a glass very much excited, and took a look,
and says:
“That’s it — it’s the one I’ve been looking for,
sure. If I’m right, it’s the one the dervish took the
man into and showed him all the treasures.”
So we begun to gaze, and he begun to tell about it
out of the Arabian Nights.
CHAPTER X.
THE TREASURE-HILL
TOM said it happened like this.
A dervish was stumping it along through the
Desert, on foot, one blazing hot day, and he had come
a thousand miles and was pretty poor, and hungry,
and ornery and tired, and along about where we are
now he run across a camel-driver with a hundred
camels, and asked him for some a’ms. But the camel-
driver he asked to be excused. The dervish said:
“Don’t you own these camels?”
“Yes, they’re mine.”
“Are you in debt?”
“Who — me? No.”
“Well, a man that owns a hundred camels and ain’t
in debt is rich — and not only rich, but very rich.
Ain’t it so?”
The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then
the dervish says:
“God has made you rich, and He has made me
poor. He has His reasons, and they are wise, blessed
be His name. But He has willed that His rich shall
help His poor, and you have turned away from me,
your brother, in my need, and He will remember this,
and you will lose by it.”
That made the camel-driver feel shaky, but all the
same he was born hoggish after money and didn’t like
to let go a cent; so he begun to whine and explain,
and said times was hard, and although he had took a
full freight down to Balsora and got a fat rate for it,
he couldn’t git no return freight, and so he warn’t
making no great things out of his trip. So the dervish
starts along again, and says:
“All right, if you want to take the risk; but I
reckon you’ve made a mistake this time, and missed a
chance.”
Of course the camel-driver wanted to know what
kind of a chance he had missed, because maybe there
was money in it; so he run after the dervish, and
begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him
that at last the dervish gave in, and says:
“Do you see that hill yonder? Well, in that hill is
all the treasures of the earth, and I was looking around
for a man with a particular good kind heart and a
noble, generous disposition, because if I could find just
that man, I’ve got a kind of a salve I could put on
his eyes and he could see the treasures and get them
out.”
So then the camel-driver was in a sweat; and he
cried, and begged, and took on, and went down on his
knees, and said he was just that kind of a man, and
said he could fetch a thousand people that would say
he wasn’t ever described so exact before.
“Well, then,” says the dervish, “all right. If we
load the hundred camels, can I have half of them?”
The driver was so glad he couldn’t hardly hold in,
and says:
“Now you’re shouting.”
So they shook hands on the bargain, and the dervish
got out his box and rubbed the salve on the driver’s
right eye, and the hill opened and he went in, and
there, sure enough, was piles and piles of gold and
jewels sparkling like all the stars in heaven had fell down.
So him and the dervish laid into it, and they loaded
every camel till he couldn’t carry no more; then they