The Story of the Amulet - E. Nesbit (smart books to read TXT) 📗

corner by a furry hand, and out peeped the bat’s ears and snail’s eyes of the Psammead.

Anthea caught it in her arms and a sigh of desperate relief was breathed by each of the four.

“Oh! which is the East!” Anthea said, and she spoke hurriedly, for the noise of wild fighting drew nearer and nearer.

“Don’t choke me,” said the Psammead, “come inside.”

The inside of the hut was pitch dark.

“I’ve got a match,” said Cyril, and struck it. The floor of the hut was of soft, loose sand.

“I’ve been asleep here,” said the Psammead; “most comfortable it’s been, the best sand I’ve had for a month. It’s all right. Everything’s all right. I knew your only chance would be while the fight was going on. That man won’t come back. I bit him, and he thinks I’m an Evil Spirit. Now you’ve only got to take the thing and go.”

The hut was hung with skins. Heaped in the middle were the offerings that had been given the night before, Anthea’s roses fading on the top of the heap. At one side of the hut stood a large square stone block, and on it an oblong box of earthenware with strange figures of men and beasts on it.

“Is the thing in there?” asked Cyril, as the Psammead pointed a skinny finger at it.

“You must judge of that,” said the Psammead. “The man was just going to bury the box in the sand when I jumped out at him and bit him.”

“Light another match, Robert,” said Anthea. “Now, then quick! which is the East?”

“Why, where the sun rises, of course!”

“But someone told us⁠—”

“Oh! they’ll tell you anything!” said the Psammead impatiently, getting into its bass-bag and wrapping itself in its waterproof sheet.

“But we can’t see the sun in here, and it isn’t rising anyhow,” said Jane.

“How you do waste time!” the Psammead said. “Why, the East’s where the shrine is, of course. There!”

It pointed to the great stone.

And still the shouting and the clash of stone on metal sounded nearer and nearer. The children could hear that the headmen had surrounded the hut to protect their treasure as long as might be from the enemy. But none dare to come in after the Psammead’s sudden fierce biting of the headman.

“Now, Jane,” said Cyril, very quickly. “I’ll take the Amulet, you stand ready to hold up the charm, and be sure you don’t let it go as you come through.”

He made a step forward, but at that instant a great crackling overhead ended in a blaze of sunlight. The roof had been broken in at one side, and great slabs of it were being lifted off by two spears. As the children trembled and winked in the new light, large dark hands tore down the wall, and a dark face, with a blobby fat nose, looked over the gap. Even at that awful moment Anthea had time to think that it was very like the face of Mr. Jacob Absalom, who had sold them the charm in the shop near Charing Cross.

“Here is their Amulet,” cried a harsh, strange voice; “it is this that makes them strong to fight and brave to die. And what else have we here⁠—gods or demons?”

He glared fiercely at the children, and the whites of his eyes were very white indeed. He had a wet, red copper knife in his teeth. There was not a moment to lose.

“Jane, Jane, quick!” cried everyone passionately.

Jane with trembling hands held up the charm towards the East, and Cyril spoke the word of power. The Amulet grew to a great arch. Out beyond it was the glaring Egyptian sky, the broken wall, the cruel, dark, big-nosed face with the red, wet knife in its gleaming teeth. Within the arch was the dull, faint, greeny-brown of London grass and trees.

“Hold tight, Jane!” Cyril cried, and he dashed through the arch, dragging Anthea and the Psammead after him. Robert followed, clutching Jane. And in the ears of each, as they passed through the arch of the charm, the sound and fury of battle died out suddenly and utterly, and they heard only the low, dull, discontented hum of vast London, and the peeking and patting of the sparrows on the gravel and the voices of the ragged baby children playing Ring-o’-Roses on the yellow trampled grass. And the charm was a little charm again in Jane’s hand, and there was the basket with their dinner and the bathbuns lying just where they had left it.

“My hat!” said Cyril, drawing a long breath; “that was something like an adventure.”

“It was rather like one, certainly,” said the Psammead.

They all lay still, breathing in the safe, quiet air of Regent’s Park.

“We’d better go home at once,” said Anthea presently. “Old Nurse will be most frightfully anxious. The sun looks about the same as it did when we started yesterday. We’ve been away twenty-four hours.”

“The buns are quite soft still,” said Cyril, feeling one; “I suppose the dew kept them fresh.”

They were not hungry, curiously enough.

They picked up the dinner-basket and the Psammead-basket, and went straight home.

Old Nurse met them with amazement.

“Well, if ever I did!” she said. “What’s gone wrong? You’ve soon tired of your picnic.”

The children took this to be bitter irony, which means saying the exact opposite of what you mean in order to make yourself disagreeable; as when you happen to have a dirty face, and someone says, “How nice and clean you look!”

“We’re very sorry,” began Anthea, but old Nurse said⁠—

“Oh, bless me, child, I don’t care! Please yourselves and you’ll please me. Come in and get your dinners comf’table. I’ve got a potato on a-boiling.”

When she had gone to attend to the potatoes the children looked at each other. Could it be that old Nurse had so changed that she no longer cared that they should have been away from home for twenty-four hours⁠—all night in fact⁠—without any explanation whatever?

But the Psammead put its head out of its basket and said⁠—

“What’s the matter? Don’t