t that there was land. Tim and Huck woke up, but found they were not in Europe but in the Great Sahara Desert in Africa. They landed the balloon and ran a little to stretch their legs, but a lion started chasing them, so they got back into the balloon for safety. They had another encounter with lions later, but they escaped them too.Tom usually kept the balloon pretty high in altitude in order to catch the winds, so they could not see the desert too well from where they were. But one time they noticed a line of black things moving across the desert. Tom thought it to be camels, and sure enough it was a caravan of camels, with Arabs of course.They started to run out of water and then they found a lake. Beside the lake they killed a lion with the professor’s revolver. They then tied a rope to it and brought it onto the ship. They also caught fish in the same lake that they had gotten their water from.They had found another caravan and started to follow them, but a great sandstorm came and wiped the caravan out. The sand had killed and then buried the Arabs. When they finally had gotten to the end of the desert, they saw the great pyramids of Egypt and the Sphinx. Tom then found the granary where Joseph stored the grain before the famine. They also saw the Red Sea and Mount Sinai. Things were going well until Tom’s smoking pipe fell to pieces. He would not settle for any other pipe, so he told Jim and a local guide to fly back home and get his pipe, which was in his aunt’s house. Tom calculated that it would only take about two days to go home and get back to where they were, and sure enough it did; but Aunt Polly saw Jim and told him to tell Tom that he better get home quick because he was in trouble. The book ended when the boys were headed back home for Missouri....
