A word on balloons

My new book is out, and in it Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Jim go up from a fair in St. Louis in a professor's flying machine, and the professor goes mad and falls out somewhere over the Atlantic, and the boys keep going, and come down in the Sahara, and look at the Sphinx, and go on to Cairo and Mount Sinai, and argue the whole way. I have had letters asking whether this is possible. It is not. But neither is anything those boys do, and they have done it all before, and sold well.

The people who keep this website say a flight in the log ought to have an airline. I have put down the Professor's airship. They say it ought to have a flight number. I have left that empty, because the Professor did not believe in numbers, and in fact did not believe in very much by the end. They say the distance is worked out from the airports. I would like to see the airport that Tom Sawyer left from. It was a field, with a band in it.

I have never been up in a balloon myself and I do not mean to go. A man who has piloted steamboats on the Mississippi has had all the excitement he needs from things that go up, mostly boilers. I will stay on the ground and let the boys do the flying. They are fictional, and it does them no harm.

Read nextThe Sphinx, and the man with the hammerI went to the Sphinx myself in 1867, the slow way. Tom borrowed the description.