The Story of the Amulet

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The Story of the Amulet
by E. Nesbit

TO
Dr Wallis Budge
of the British Museum as a
small token of gratitude for his
unfailing kindness and help
in the making of it

CONTENTS

1. The Psammead
2. The Half Amulet
3. The Past
4. Eight Thousand Years Ago
5. The Fight in the Village
6. The Way to Babylon
7. 'The Deepest Dungeon Below the Castle Moat'
8. The Queen in London
9. Atlantis
10. The Little Black Girl and Julius Caesar
11. Before Pharaoh
12. The Sorry-Present and the Expelled Little Boy
13. The Shipwreck on the Tin Islands
14. The Heart's Desire

CHAPTER 1

THE PSAMMEAD

There were once four children who spent their summer holidays in
a white house, happily situated between a sandpit and a chalkpit.
One day they had the good fortune to find in the sandpit a
strange creature. Its eyes were on long horns like snail's eyes,
and it could move them in and out like telescopes. It had ears
like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's
and covered with thick soft fur--and it had hands and feet like a
monkey's. It told the children--whose names were Cyril, Robert,
Anthea, and Jane--that it was a Psammead or sand-fairy.
(Psammead is pronounced Sammy-ad.) It was old, old, old, and its
birthday was almost at the very beginning of everything. And it
had been buried in the sand for thousands of years. But it still
kept its fairylikeness, and part of this fairylikeness was its
power to give people whatever they wished for. You know fairies
have always been able to do this. Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and
Jane now found their wishes come true; but, somehow, they never
could think of just the right things to wish for, and their
wishes sometimes turned out very oddly indeed. In the end their
unwise wishings landed them in what Robert called 'a very tight
place indeed', and the Psammead consented to help them out of it
in return for their promise never never to ask it to grant them
any more wishes, and never to tell anyone about it, because it
did not want to be bothered to give wishes to anyone ever any
more. At the moment of parting Jane said politely--

'I wish we were going to see you again some day.'

And the Psammead, touched by this friendly thought, granted the
wish. The book about all this is called Five Children and It,
and it ends up in a most tiresome way by saying--

'The children DID see the Psammead again, but it was not in the
sandpit; it was--but I must say no more--'

The reason that nothing more could be said was that I had not
then been able to find out exactly when and where the children
met the Psammead again. Of course I knew they would meet it,
because it was a beast of its word, and when it said a thing
would happen, that thing happened without fail. How different
from the people who tell us about what weather it is going to be
on Thursday next, in London, the South Coast, and Channel!

The summer holidays during which the Psammead had been found and
the wishes given had been wonderful holidays in the country, and
the children had the highest hopes of just such another holiday
for the next summer. The winter holidays were beguiled by the
wonderful happenings of The Phoenix and the Carpet, and the loss
of these two treasures would have left the children in despair,
but for the splendid hope of their next holiday in the country.
The world, they felt, and indeed had some reason to feel, was
full of wonderful things--and they were really the sort of people
that wonderful things happen to. So they looked forward to the
summer holiday; but when it came everything was different, and
very, very horrid. Father had to go out to Manchuria to
telegraph news about the war to the tiresome paper he wrote
for--the Daily Bellower, or something like that, was its name.
And Mother, poor dear Mother, was away in Madeira, because she
had been very ill. And The Lamb--I mean the baby--was with her.
And Aunt Emma, who was Mother's sister, had suddenly married
Uncle Reginald, who was Father's brother, and they had gone to
China, which is much too far off for you to expect to be asked to
spend the holidays in, however fond your aunt and uncle may be of
you. So the children were left in the care of old Nurse, who
lived in Fitzroy Street, near the British Museum, and though she
was always very kind to them, and indeed spoiled them far more
than would be good for the most grown-up of us, the four children
felt perfectly wretched, and when the cab had driven off with
Father and all his boxes and guns and the sheepskin, with
blankets and the aluminium mess-kit inside it, the stoutest heart
quailed, and the girls broke down altogether, and sobbed in each
other's arms, while the boys each looked out of one of the long
gloomy windows of the parlour, and tried to pretend that no boy
would be such a muff as to cry.

I hope you notice that they were not cowardly enough to cry till
their Father had gone; they knew he had quite enough to upset him
without that. But when he was gone everyone felt as if it had
been trying not to cry all its life, and that it must cry now, if
it died for it. So they cried.

Tea--with shrimps and watercress--cheered them a little. The
watercress was arranged in a hedge round a fat glass salt-cellar,
a tasteful device they had never seen before. But it was not a
cheerful meal.

After tea Anthea went up to the room that had been Father's, and
when she saw how dreadfully he wasn't there, and remembered how
every minute was taking him further and further from her, and
nearer and nearer to the guns of the Russians, she cried a little
more. Then she thought of Mother, ill and alone, and perhaps at
that very moment wanting a little girl to put eau-de-cologne on
her head, and make her sudden cups of tea, and she cried more
than ever. And then she remembered what Mother had said, the
night before she went away, about Anthea being the eldest girl,
and about trying to make the others happy, and things like that.
So she stopped crying, and thought instead. And when she had
thought as long as she could bear she washed her face and combed
her hair, and went down to the others, trying her best to look as
though crying were an exercise she had never even heard of.

She found the parlour in deepest gloom, hardly relieved at all by
the efforts of Robert, who, to make the time pass, was pulling
Jane's hair--not hard, but just enough to tease.

'Look here,' said Anthea. 'Let's have a palaver.' This word
dated from the awful day when Cyril had carelessly wished that
there were Red Indians in England--and there had been. The word
brought back memories of last summer holidays and everyone
groaned; they thought of the white house with the beautiful
tangled garden--late roses, asters, marigold, sweet mignonette,
and feathery asparagus--of the wilderness which someone had once
meant to make into an orchard, but which was now, as Father said,
'five acres of thistles haunted by the ghosts of baby
cherry-trees'. They thought of the view across the valley, where
the lime-kilns looked like Aladdin's palaces in the sunshine, and
they thought of their own sandpit, with its fringe of yellowy
grasses and pale-stringy-stalked wild flowers, and the little
holes in the cliff that were the little sand-martins' little
front doors. And they thought of the free fresh air smelling of
thyme and sweetbriar, and the scent of the wood-smoke from the
cottages in the lane--and they looked round old Nurse's stuffy
parlour, and Jane said--

'Oh, how different it all is!'

It was. Old Nurse had been in the habit of letting lodgings,
till Father gave her the children to take care of. And her rooms
were furnished 'for letting'. Now it is a very odd thing that no
one ever seems to furnish a room 'for letting' in a bit the same
way as one would furnish it for living in. This room had heavy
dark red stuff curtains--the colour that blood would not make a
stain on--with coarse lace curtains inside. The carpet was
yellow, and violet, with bits of grey and brown oilcloth in odd
places. The fireplace had shavings and tinsel in it. There was
a very varnished mahogany chiffonier, or sideboard, with a lock
that wouldn't act. There were hard chairs--far too many of
them--with crochet antimacassars slipping off their seats, all of
which sloped the wrong way. The table wore a cloth of a cruel
green colour with a yellow chain-stitch pattern round it. Over
the fireplace was a looking-glass that made you look much uglier
than you really were, however plain you might be to begin with.
Then there was a mantelboard with maroon plush and wool fringe
that did not match the plush; a dreary clock like a black marble
tomb--it was silent as the grave too, for it had long since
forgotten how to tick. And there were painted glass vases that
never had any flowers in, and a painted tambourine that no one
ever played, and painted brackets with nothing on them.

'And maple-framed engravings of the Queen, the Houses of
Parliament, the Plains of Heaven, and of a blunt-nosed
woodman's flat return.'

There were two books--last December's Bradshaw, and an odd volume
of Plumridge's Commentary on Thessalonians. There were--but I
cannot dwell longer on this painful picture. It was indeed, as
Jane said, very different.

'Let's have a palaver,' said Anthea again.

'What about?' said Cyril, yawning.

'There's nothing to have ANYTHING about,' said Robert kicking the
leg of the table miserably.

'I don't want to play,' said Jane, and her tone was grumpy.

Anthea tried very hard not to be cross. She succeeded.

'Look here,' she said, 'don't think I want to be preachy or a
beast in any way, but I want to what Father calls define the
situation. Do you agree?'

'Fire ahead,' said Cyril without enthusiasm.

'Well then. We all know the reason we're staying here is because
Nurse couldn't leave her house on account of the poor learned
gentleman on the top-floor. And there was no one else Father
could entrust to take care of us--and you know it's taken a lot
of money, Mother's going to Madeira to be made well.'

Jane sniffed miserably.

'Yes, I know,' said Anthea in a hurry, 'but don't let's think
about how horrid it all is. I mean we can't go to things that
cost a lot, but we must do SOMETHING. And I know there are heaps
of things you can see in London without paying for them, and I
thought we'd go and see them. We are all quite old now, and we
haven't got The Lamb--'

Jane sniffed harder than before.

'I mean no one can say "No" because of him, dear pet. And I
thought we MUST get Nurse to see how quite old we are, and let us
go out by ourselves, or else we shall never have any sort of a
time at all. And I vote we see everything there is, and let's
begin by asking Nurse to give us some bits of bread and we'll go
to St James's Park. There are ducks there, I know, we can feed
them. Only we must make Nurse let us go by ourselves.'

'Hurrah for liberty!' said Robert, 'but she won't.'

'Yes she will,' said Jane unexpectedly. '_I_ thought about that
this morning, and I asked Father, and he said yes; and what's
more he told old Nurse we might, only he said we must always say
where we wanted to go, and if it was right she would let us.'

'Three cheers for thoughtful Jane,' cried Cyril, now roused at
last from his yawning despair. 'I say, let's go now.'

So they went, old Nurse only begging them to be careful of
crossings, and to ask a policeman to assist in the more difficult
cases. But they were used to crossings, for they had lived in
Camden Town and knew the Kentish Town Road where the trams rush
up and down like mad at all hours of the day and night, and seem
as though, if anything, they would rather run over you than not.

They had promised to be home by dark, but it was July, so dark
would be very late indeed, and long past bedtime.

They started to walk to St James's Park, and all their pockets
were stuffed with bits of bread and the crusts of toast, to feed
the ducks with. They started, I repeat, but they never got
there.

Between Fitzroy Street and St James's Park there are a great many
streets, and, if you go the right way you will pass a great many
shops that you cannot possibly help stopping to look at. The
children stopped to look at several with gold-lace and beads and
pictures and jewellery and dresses, and hats, and oysters and
lobsters in their windows, and their sorrow did not seem nearly
so impossible to bear as it had done in the best parlour at No.
300, Fitzroy Street.

Presently, by some wonderful chance turn of Robert's (who had
been voted Captain because the girls thought it would be good for
him-- and indeed he thought so himself--and of course Cyril
couldn't vote against him because it would have looked like a
mean jealousy), they came into the little interesting
criss-crossy streets that held the most interesting shops of
all--the shops where live things were sold. There was one shop
window entirely filled with cages, and all sorts of beautiful
birds in them. The children were delighted till they remembered
how they had once wished for wings themselves, and had had
them--and then they felt how desperately unhappy anything with
wings must be if it is shut up in a cage and not allowed to fly.

'It must be fairly beastly to be a bird in a cage,' said Cyril.
'Come on!'

They went on, and Cyril tried to think out a scheme for making
his fortune as a gold-digger at Klondyke, and then buying all the
caged birds in the world and setting them free. Then they came
to a shop that sold cats, but the cats were in cages, and the
children could not help wishing someone would buy all the cats
and put them on hearthrugs, which are the proper places for cats.
And there was the dog-shop, and that was not a happy thing to
look at either, because all the dogs were chained or caged, and
all the dogs, big and little, looked at the four children with
sad wistful eyes and wagged beseeching tails as if they were
trying to say, 'Buy me! buy me! buy me! and let me go for a walk
with you; oh, do buy me, and buy my poor brothers too! Do! do!
do!' They almost said, 'Do! do! do!' plain to the ear, as they
whined; all but one big Irish terrier, and he growled when Jane
patted him.

'Grrrrr,' he seemed to say, as he looked at them from the back
corner of his eye--'YOU won't buy me. Nobody will--ever--I shall
die chained up--and I don't know that I care how soon it is,
either!'

I don't know that the children would have understood all this,
only once they had been in a besieged castle, so they knew how
hateful it is to be kept in when you want to get out.

Of course they could not buy any of the dogs. They did, indeed,
ask the price of the very, very smallest, and it was sixty-five
pounds--but that was because it was a Japanese toy spaniel like
the Queen once had her portrait painted with, when she was only
Princess of Wales. But the children thought, if the smallest was
all that money, the biggest would run into thousands--so they
went on.

And they did not stop at any more cat or dog or bird shops, but
passed them by, and at last they came to a shop that seemed as
though it only sold creatures that did not much mind where they
were--such as goldfish and white mice, and sea-anemones and other
aquarium beasts, and lizards and toads, and hedgehogs and
tortoises, and tame rabbits and guinea-pigs. And there they
stopped for a long time, and fed the guinea-pigs with bits of
bread through the cage-bars, and wondered whether it would be
possible to keep a sandy-coloured double-lop in the basement of
the house in Fitzroy Street.

'I don't suppose old Nurse would mind VERY much,' said Jane.
'Rabbits are most awfully tame sometimes. I expect it would know
her voice and follow her all about.'

'She'd tumble over it twenty times a day,' said Cyril; 'now a
snake--'

'There aren't any snakes, said Robert hastily, 'and besides, I
never could cotton to snakes somehow--I wonder why.'

'Worms are as bad,' said Anthea, 'and eels and slugs--I think
it's because we don't like things that haven't got legs.'

'Father says snakes have got legs hidden away inside of them,'
said Robert.

'Yes--and he says WE'VE got tails hidden away inside us--but it
doesn't either of it come to anything REALLY,' said Anthea. 'I
hate things that haven't any legs.'

'It's worse when they have too many,' said Jane with a shudder,
'think of centipedes!'

They stood there on the pavement, a cause of some inconvenience
to the passersby, and thus beguiled the time with conversation.
Cyril was leaning his elbow on the top of a hutch that had seemed
empty when they had inspected the whole edifice of hutches one by
one, and he was trying to reawaken the interest of a hedgehog
that had curled itself into a ball earlier in the interview, when
a small, soft voice just below his elbow said, quietly, plainly
and quite unmistakably--not in any squeak or whine that had to be
translated--but in downright common English--

'Buy me--do--please buy me!'

Cyril started as though he had been pinched, and jumped a yard
away from the hutch.

'Come back--oh, come back!' said the voice, rather louder but
still softly; 'stoop down and pretend to be tying up your
bootlace--I see it's undone, as usual.'

Cyril mechanically obeyed. He knelt on one knee on the dry, hot
dusty pavement, peered into the darkness of the hutch and found
himself face to face with--the Psammead!

It seemed much thinner than when he had last seen it. It was
dusty and dirty, and its fur was untidy and ragged. It had
hunched itself up into a miserable lump, and its long snail's
eyes were drawn in quite tight so that they hardly showed at all.

'Listen,' said the Psammead, in a voice that sounded as though it
would begin to cry in a minute, 'I don't think the creature who
keeps this shop will ask a very high price for me. I've bitten
him more than once, and I've made myself look as common as I can.
He's never had a glance from my beautiful, beautiful eyes. Tell
the others I'm here--but tell them to look at some of those low,
common beasts while I'm talking to you. The creature inside
mustn't think you care much about me, or he'll put a price upon
me far, far beyond your means. I remember in the dear old days
last summer you never had much money. Oh--I never thought I
should be so glad to see you--I never did.' It sniffed, and shot
out its long snail's eyes expressly to drop a tear well away from
its fur. 'Tell the others I'm here, and then I'll tell you
exactly what to do about buying me.' Cyril tied his bootlace
into a hard knot, stood up and addressed the others in firm
tones--

'Look here,' he said, 'I'm not kidding--and I appeal to your
honour,' an appeal which in this family was never made in vain.
'Don't look at that hutch--look at the white rat. Now you are
not to look at that hutch whatever I say.'

He stood in front of it to prevent mistakes.

'Now get yourselves ready for a great surprise. In that hutch
there's an old friend of ours--DON'T look!--Yes; it's the
Psammead, the good old Psammead! it wants us to buy it. It says
you're not to look at it. Look at the white rat and count your
money! On your honour don't look!'

The others responded nobly. They looked at the white rat till
they quite stared him out of countenance, so that he went and sat
up on his hind legs in a far corner and hid his eyes with his
front paws, and pretended he was washing his face.

Cyril stooped again, busying himself with the other bootlace and
listened for the Psammead's further instructions.

'Go in,' said the Psammead, 'and ask the price of lots of other
things. Then say, "What do you want for that monkey that's lost
its tail--the mangy old thing in the third hutch from the end."
Oh--don't mind MY feelings--call me a mangy monkey--I've tried
hard enough to look like one! I don't think he'll put a high
price on me--I've bitten him eleven times since I came here the
day before yesterday. If he names a bigger price than you can
afford, say you wish you had the money.'

'But you can't give us wishes. I've promised never to have
another wish from you,' said the bewildered Cyril.

'Don't be a silly little idiot,' said the Sand-fairy in trembling
but affectionate tones, 'but find out how much money you've got
between you, and do exactly what I tell you.'

Cyril, pointing a stiff and unmeaning finger at the white rat, so
as to pretend that its charms alone employed his tongue,
explained matters to the others, while the Psammead hunched
itself, and bunched itself, and did its very best to make itself
look uninteresting. Then the four children filed into the shop.

'How much do you want for that white rat?' asked Cyril.

'Eightpence,' was the answer.

'And the guinea-pigs?'

'Eighteenpence to five bob, according to the breed.'

'And the lizards?'

'Ninepence each.'

'And toads?'

'Fourpence. Now look here,' said the greasy owner of all this
caged life with a sudden ferocity which made the whole party back
hurriedly on to the wainscoting of hutches with which the shop
was lined. 'Lookee here. I ain't agoin' to have you a comin' in
here a turnin' the whole place outer winder, an' prizing every
animile in the stock just for your larks, so don't think it! If
you're a buyer, BE a buyer--but I never had a customer yet as
wanted to buy mice, and lizards, and toads, and guineas all at
once. So hout you goes.'

'Oh! wait a minute,' said the wretched Cyril, feeling how
foolishly yet well-meaningly he had carried out the Psammead's
instructions. 'Just tell me one thing. What do you want for the
mangy old monkey in the third hutch from the end?'

The shopman only saw in this a new insult.

'Mangy young monkey yourself,' said he; 'get along with your
blooming cheek. Hout you goes!'

'Oh! don't be so cross,' said Jane, losing her head altogether,
'don't you see he really DOES want to know THAT!'

'Ho! does 'e indeed,' sneered the merchant. Then he scratched
his ear suspiciously, for he was a sharp business man, and he
knew the ring of truth when he heard it. His hand was bandaged,
and three minutes before he would have been glad to sell the
'mangy old monkey' for ten shillings. Now-- 'Ho! 'e does, does
'e,' he said, 'then two pun ten's my price. He's not got his
fellow that monkey ain't, nor yet his match, not this side of the
equator, which he comes from. And the only one ever seen in
London. Ought to be in the Zoo. Two pun ten, down on the nail,
or hout you goes!'

The children looked at each other--twenty-three shillings and
fivepence was all they had in the world, and it would have been
merely three and fivepence, but for the sovereign which Father
had given to them 'between them' at parting. 'We've only
twenty-three shillings and fivepence,' said Cyril, rattling the
money in his pocket.

'Twenty-three farthings and somebody's own cheek,' said the
dealer, for he did not believe that Cyril had so much money.

There was a miserable pause. Then Anthea remembered, and said--

'Oh! I WISH I had two pounds ten.'

'So do I, Miss, I'm sure,' said the man with bitter politeness;
'I wish you 'ad, I'm sure!'

Anthea's hand was on the counter, something seemed to slide under
it. She lifted it. There lay five bright half sovereigns.

'Why, I HAVE got it after all,' she said; 'here's the money, now
let's have the Sammy,... the monkey I mean.'

The dealer looked hard at the money, but he made haste to put it
in his pocket.

'I only hope you come by it honest,' he said, shrugging his
shoulders. He scratched his ear again.

'Well!' he said, 'I suppose I must let you have it, but it's
worth thribble the money, so it is--'

He slowly led the way out to the hutch--opened the door gingerly,
and made a sudden fierce grab at the Psammead, which the Psammead
acknowledged in one last long lingering bite.

'Here, take the brute,' said the shopman, squeezing the Psammead
so tight that he nearly choked it. 'It's bit me to the marrow,
it have.'

The man's eyes opened as Anthea held out her arms.

'Don't blame me if it tears your face off its bones,' he said,
and the Psammead made a leap from his dirty horny hands, and
Anthea caught it in hers, which were not very clean, certainly,
but at any rate were soft and pink, and held it kindly and
closely.

'But you can't take it home like that,' Cyril said, 'we shall
have a crowd after us,' and indeed two errand boys and a
policeman had already collected.

'I can't give you nothink only a paper-bag, like what we put the
tortoises in,' said the man grudgingly.

So the whole party went into the shop, and the shopman's eyes
nearly came out of his head when, having given Anthea the largest
paper-bag he could find, he saw her hold it open, and the
Psammead carefully creep into it. 'Well!' he said, 'if that there
don't beat cockfighting! But p'raps you've met the brute afore.'

'Yes,' said Cyril affably, 'he's an old friend of ours.'

'If I'd a known that,' the man rejoined, 'you shouldn't a had him
under twice the money. 'Owever,' he added, as the children
disappeared, 'I ain't done so bad, seeing as I only give five bob
for the beast. But then there's the bites to take into account!'

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