The Story of the Amulet quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

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!”

“Don’t you want any breakfast?” asked Anthea.

“I daresay I shall pick a bit presently,” it said; “but sand is all I care about⁠—it’s meat and drink to me, and coals and fire and wife and children.”

With these words it clambered down by the bedclothes and scrambled back into the bath, where they heard it scratching itself out of sight.

“When you’d gone away,” it said, “I went to sand for a bit, and slept. I was tired out with all your silly wishes, and I felt as though I hadn’t really been to sand for a year.”

“Where I sleep. You go to bed. I go to sand.”

Jane yawned; the mention of bed made her feel sleepy.

The gentleman took off his spectacles and laughed.

His laugh sounded rusty, Cyril thought, as though it wasn’t often used.

“Of course!” he said. “I’m sure I beg your pardon. I think I must have been in a dream. You are the children who live downstairs, are you not? Yes. I have seen you as I have passed in and out.

And the voice grew, not so much in loudness as in sweetness (though it grew louder, too), till it was so sweet that you wanted to cry with pleasure just at the sound of it.

It was like nightingales, and the sea, and the fiddle, and the voice of your mother when you have been a long time away, and she meets you at the door when you get home.

“Speak. What is it that you would hear?”

I cannot tell you what language the voice used. I only know that everyone present understood it perfectly.

If you come to think of it, there must be some language that everyone could understand, if we only knew what it was.

Nor can I tell you how the charm spoke, nor whether it was the charm that spoke, or some presence in the charm. The children could not have told you either.

The Psammead whispered crossly, “Don’t you understand? The thing existed in the Past. If you were in the Past, too, you could find it. It’s very difficult to make you understand things.

Time and space are only forms of thought.

”

During this dazzling interval Anthea felt for the charm and pushed it inside Jane’s frock, so that it might be quite safe. When their eyes got used to the new wonderful light the children looked around them.

The sky was very, very blue, and it sparkled and glittered and dazzled like the sea at home when the sun shines on it.

They were standing on a little clearing in a thick, low forest; there were trees and shrubs and a close, thorny, tangly undergrowth. In front of them stretched a bank of strange black mud, then came the browny-yellowy shining ribbon of a river.

“It’s a hippopotamus,” said Cyril; “it seems much more real somehow than the one at the Zoo, doesn’t it?”

“I’m glad it’s being real on the other side of the river,” said Jane.

And now there was a crackling of reeds and twigs behind them. This was horrible. Of course it might be another hippopotamus, or a crocodile, or a lion—or, in fact, almost anything.

You may think what you like. Perhaps the children had found out the universal language which everyone can understand, and which wise men so far have not found.

You will have noticed long ago that they were singularly lucky children, and they may have had this piece of luck as well as others.

Or it may have been that … but why pursue the question further? The fact remains that in all their adventures the muddleheaded inventions which we call foreign languages never bothered them in the least. They could always understand and be understood.

Jane bit her lip and tried to decide not to cry.

Robert felt in his pocket for a toy pistol and loaded it with a pink paper cap. It was his only weapon.

Cyril tightened his belt two holes.

“I won’t!” she cried; “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! If you make me I’ll scream and I’ll scream, and I’ll tell old Nurse, and I’ll get her to burn the charm in the kitchen fire. So now, then!”

You can imagine how furious everyone was with Jane for feeling what each of them had felt all the morning.

In each breast the same thought arose, “No one can say it’s our fault.” And they at once began to show Jane how angry they all felt that all the fault was hers. This made them feel quite brave.

Cyril took up a book, but it was not interesting to read. Robert kicked a chair-leg absently.

His feet were always eloquent in moments of emotion.

Anthea stood pleating the end of the tablecloth into folds—she seemed earnestly anxious to get all the pleats the same size. The sound of Jane’s sobs had died away.

“They’d only think we’d stolen it,” said Cyril bitterly, “and put us in prison.”

“All roads lead to prison with you, it seems,” said the Queen.

“The learned gentleman!” said Anthea, and ran up to him with the ring in her hand.

No one answered.

The wage-system of modern England is a little difficult to explain in three words even if you understand it⁠—which the children didn’t.

“You’ll have a revolt of your slaves if you’re not careful,” said the Queen.

So he said aloud: “Thank you very much, but I have only a quarter of an hour to spare.”

“It doesn’t take any time,” said Cyril; “time is only a mode of thought, you know, and you’ve got to go some time, so why not with us?”

“Very well,” said the learned gentleman, now quite certain that he was dreaming.

They stood and looked across the wide quay to the town that rose beyond it.

What they saw was the most beautiful sight any of them had ever seen⁠—or ever dreamed of.

The blue sea sparkled in soft sunlight; little white-capped waves broke softly against the marble breakwaters that guarded the shipping of a great city from the wilderness of winter winds and seas.

The children were sitting on a seat in St. James’s Park. They had been watching the pelican repulsing with careful dignity the advances of the seagulls who are always so anxious to play games with it.

The pelican thinks, very properly, that it hasn’t the figure for games, so it spends most of its time pretending that that is not the reason why it won’t play.

The breathlessness caused by Atlantis was wearing off a little. Cyril, who always wanted to understand all about everything, was turning things over in his mind.

And there they stood in a circle still holding hands, as though they were playing Ring-o’-Roses or the Mulberry Bush. Just six people hand in hand in a wood.

That sounds simple, but then you must remember that they did not know where the wood was, and what’s more, they didn’t know when then wood was.

There was a curious sort of feeling that made the learned gentleman say—

“Your inconsiderate friend,” the Psammead replied, “wished to find some home where they would be glad to have that unattractive and immature female human being whom you have picked up—gracious knows how.

In Megatherium days properly brought-up children didn’t talk to shabby strangers in parks.

Your thoughtless friend wanted a place where someone would be glad to have this undesirable stranger. And now here you are!”

I wish you could have seen all the honours and kindnesses lavished on the children and the learned gentleman by those ancient Britons.

You would have thought, to see them, that a child was something to make a fuss about, not a bit of rubbish to be hustled about the streets and hidden away in the Workhouse.

It wasn’t as grand as the entertainment at Babylon, but somehow it was more satisfying.

“

When we were in the Past the present was the future.

Now then!” he added triumphantly.

“Nor yet me,” said Robert. “

It’s always the end of the adventures when it comes to the marriage hands.

”

I told him a beautiful princess would be sent to him from Syria, and, lo! a woman thirty years old arrived. But she was a beautiful woman not so long ago.

Time is only a mode of thought, you know.

”

“Why, don’t you see? It’s really not any good our going into the Past looking for that Amulet.

The Past’s as full of different times as⁠—as the sea is of sand.

We’re simply bound to hit upon the wrong time. We might spend our lives looking for the Amulet and never see a sight of it. Why, it’s the end of September already. It’s like looking for a needle in—”

“

It’s always mealtimes just when you come to anything interesting.

”

“

Not if the penance is something to please someone else.

I didn’t mean old peas and hair shirts and sleeping on the stones. I mean we’ll make her a sorry-present,” explained Anthea. “Look here! I vote Cyril doesn’t tell us his idea until we’ve done something for old Nurse.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Cyril’s tone was impatient, “some silly old enchanted rule I suppose.

I wish people would teach you magic at school like they do sums⁠—or instead of.

It would be some use having an Amulet then.”

“Well, I shouldn’t do it again, if I were you,” said the man, and they could see he did not believe them.

There is no company so little pleasing as that of people who do not believe you.

“Thank you for showing us the label,” said Cyril. And they came away.

And it was.

Everybody looked calm, no one seemed to be in a hurry, no one seemed to be anxious, or fretted, and though some did seem to be sad, not a single one looked worried.

But though the people looked kind everyone looked so interested in the children that they began to feel a little shy and turned out of the big main path into a narrow little one that wound among trees and shrubs and mossy, dripping springs.

It was very bare, there were no ornaments, and yet every single thing was beautiful, from the dresser with its rows of bright china, to the thick squares of Eastern-looking carpet on the floors.

I can’t describe that house; I haven’t the time. And I haven’t heart either, when I think how different it was from our houses.

The lady took them all over it. The oddest thing of all was the big room in the middle. It had padded walls and a soft, thick carpet, and all the chairs and tables were padded.

“If we’re ever like that, we shan’t know it’s horrid, I expect,” Anthea with some insight whispered back. “

You see, you get used to yourself while you’re changing.

It’s—it’s being so sudden makes it seem so frightful now.”

And they can’t upset my theories”—he rubbed his thin hands and laughed triumphantly—“they can’t, though they’ve tried.

Theories, they call them, but they’re more like⁠—I don’t know⁠—more like memories.

I know I’m right about the secret rites of the Temple of Amen.”

Devant was pouring out glasses of all sorts of different things to drink, out of one kettle with one spout, and the audience were delightedly tasting them, that Robert felt someone in that vacant seat. He did not feel someone sit down in it.

It was just that one moment there was no one sitting there, and the next moment, suddenly, there was someone.

Robert turned. The someone who had suddenly filled that empty place was Rekh-marā, the Priest of Amen!

“A jolly good trick,” he said to himself, “and worked under my own eyes, in my own hall. I’ll find out how that’s done.”

He had never seen a trick that he could not do himself if he tried.

By this time a good many eyes in the audience had turned on the clean-shaven, curiously-dressed figure of the Egyptian Priest.