bath. 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 warn’t
worth much to look at, being such an old tumble-down
wreck; but Tom was satisfied, and made more fuss over
it than I would make if I stuck a nail in my foot.
How he ever found that place was too many for me.
We passed as much as forty just like it before we come
to it, and any of them would ‘a’ done for me, but none
but just the right one would suit him; I never see any-
body so particular as Tom Sawyer. The minute he
struck the right one he reconnized it as easy as I would
reconnize my other shirt if I had one, but how he done
it he couldn’t any more tell than he could fly; he said
so himself.
Then we hunted a long time for the house where the
boy lived that learned the cadi how to try the case of
the old olives and the new ones, and said it was out of
the Arabian Nights, and he would tell me and Jim
about it when he got time. Well, we hunted and
hunted till I was ready to drop, and I wanted Tom to
give it up and come next day and git somebody that
knowed the town and could talk Missourian and could
go straight to the place; but no, he wanted to find it
himself, and nothing else would answer. So on we
went. Then at last the remarkablest thing happened I
ever see. The house was gone — gone hundreds of
years ago — every last rag of it gone but just one mud
brick. Now a person wouldn’t ever believe that a
backwoods Missouri boy that hadn’t ever been in that
town before could go and hunt that place over and find
that brick, but Tom Sawyer done it. I know he done
it, because I see him do it. I was right by his very
side at the time, and see him see the brick and see him
reconnize it. Well, I says to myself, how DOES he do
it? Is it knowledge, or is it instink?
Now there’s the facts, just as they happened: let
everybody explain it their own way. I’ve ciphered
over it a good deal, and it’s my opinion that some of it
is knowledge but the main bulk of it is instink. The
reason is this: Tom put the brick in his pocket to give