y, there were a thousand
hooks. Do you get the idea? Yes; that's it exactly. The niggers dived
overboard with the goat-skins, swam under the raft, and tied the thongs
to the hooks. And when all of them were tied on, the raft floated like a
bladder. You simply _couldn't_ sink it.

"Naturally enough, the thing took time, and there were accidents and
setbacks. For instance, some of the niggers were so light in weight that
they couldn't hold their goat-skins under water long enough to get them
under the raft. I had to weight those fellows by having rocks tied
around their middles. And when they had fastened their goat-skins and
tried to swim back, some of them were carried down by the rocks. I never
made any exact count, but I suppose that two or three hundred of them
were drowned in that way. Besides, a couple of hundred were drowned
because they couldn't hold their breaths long enough to swim under the
raft and back. But what of it? I wasn't trying to hoard up niggers, but
to make a raft that would float. And I did it.

"Well, once I showed how it could be done, all the wiseacres caught the
idea, and after that I put a big gang to work making more rafts, and by
and by I had sixteen of them in operation, and was hauling more stone
than the masons could set. But I won't go into all that. Here is the
pyramid; it speaks for itself. One year more and I'll have the top
course laid and begin on the surfacing. I am going to make it plain
marble, with no fancy work. I could bring in a gang of Theban
stonecutters and have it carved all over with lions' heads and tiger
claws and all that sort of gim-crackery, but why waste time and money?
This isn't a menagerie, but a pyramid. My idea was to make it the boss
pyramid of the world. The king who tries to beat it will have to get up
pretty early in the morning.

"But what troubles I have had! Believe me, there has been nothing but
trouble, trouble, trouble from the start. I set aside the engineering
difficulties. They were hard for the engineers, but easy for me, once I
put my mind on them. But the way these niggers have carried on has been
something terrible. At the beginning I had only a thousand or two, and
they all came from one tribe; so they got along fairly well. During the
whole first year I doubt that more than twenty or thirty were killed in
fights. But then I began to get fresh batches from up the river, and
after that it was nothing but one fight after another. For two wee