The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  ‘Follow me,’ said the Captain. ‘Now, boys, get out of the way.’ He pushed through a little crowd of boys who were playing with dried chestnuts fastened to a string.

  ‘Ginger!’ remarked Robert, ‘they’re playing conkers, just like the kids in Kentish Town Road!’

  They could see now that three walls surrounded the island on which they were. The outermost wall was of brass, the Captain told them; the next, which looked like silver, was covered with tin; and the innermost one was of oricalchum.

  And right in the middle was a wall of gold, with golden towers and gates.

  ‘Behold the Temples of Poseidon,’ said the Captain. ‘It is not lawful for me to enter. I will await your return here.’

  He told them what they ought to say, and the five people from Fitzroy Street took hands and went forward. The golden gates slowly opened.

  ‘We are the children of the Sun,’ said Cyril, as he had been told, ‘and our High Priest, at least that’s what the Captain calls him. We have a different name for him at home.’

  ‘What is his name?’ asked a white-robed man who stood in the doorway with his arms extended.

  ‘Ji-Jimmy,’ replied Cyril, and he hesitated as Anthea had done. It really did seem to be taking a great liberty with so learned a gentleman. ‘And we have come to speak with your Kings in the Temple of Poseidon—does that word sound right?’ he whispered anxiously.

  ‘Quite,’ said the learned gentleman. ‘It’s very odd I can understand what you say to them, but not what they say to you.’

  ‘The Queen of Babylon found that too,’ said Cyril; ‘it’s part of the magic.’

  ‘Oh, what a dream!’ said the learned gentleman.

  The white-robed priest had been joined by others, and all were bowing low.

  ‘Enter,’ he said, ‘enter, Children of the Sun, with your High Ji-Jimmy.’

  In an inner courtyard stood the Temple—all of silver, with gold pinnacles and doors, and twenty enormous statues in bright gold of men and women. Also an immense pillar of the other precious yellow metal.

  They went through the doors, and the priest led them up a stair into a gallery from which they could look down on to the glorious place.

  ‘The ten Kings are even now choosing the bull. It is not lawful for me to behold,’ said the priest, and fell face downward on the floor outside the gallery. The children looked down.

  The roof was of ivory adorned with the three precious metals, and the walls were lined with the favourite oricalchum.

  At the far end of the Temple was a statue group, the like of which no one living has ever seen.

  It was of gold, and the head of the chief figure reached to the roof. That figure was Poseidon, the Father of the City. He stood in a great chariot drawn by six enormous horses, and round about it were a hundred mermaids riding on dolphins.

  Ten men, splendidly dressed and armed only with sticks and ropes, were trying to capture one of some fifteen bulls who ran this way and that about the floor of the Temple. The children held their breath, for the bulls looked dangerous, and the great horned heads were swinging more and more wildly.

  Anthea did not like looking at the bulls. She looked about the gallery, and noticed that another staircase led up from it to a still higher storey; also that a door led out into the open air, where there seemed to be a balcony.

  So that when a shout went up and Robert whispered, ‘Got him,’ and she looked down and saw the herd of bulls being driven out of the Temple by whips, and the ten Kings following, one of them spurring with his stick a black bull that writhed and fought in the grip of a lasso, she answered the boy’s agitated, ‘Now we shan’t see anything more,’ with—

  ‘Yes we can, there’s an outside balcony.’

  So they crowded out.

  But very soon the girls crept back.

  ‘I don’t like sacrifices,’ Jane said. So she and Anthea went and talked to the priest, who was no longer lying on his face, but sitting on the top step mopping his forehead with his robe, for it was a hot day.

  ‘It’s a special sacrifice,’ he said; ‘usually it’s only done on the justice days every five years and six years alternately. And then they drink the cup of wine with some of the bull’s blood in it, and swear to judge truly. And they wear the sacred blue robe, and put out all the Temple fires. But this today is because the City’s so upset by the odd noises from the sea, and the god inside the big mountain speaking with his thunder-voice. But all that’s happened so often before. If anything could make me uneasy it wouldn’t be that.’

  ‘What would it be?’ asked Jane kindly.

  ‘It would be the Lemmings.’

  ‘Who are they—enemies?’

  ‘They’re a sort of rat; and every year they come swimming over from the country that no man knows, and stay here awhile, and then swim away. This year they haven’t come. You know rats won’t stay on a ship that’s going to be wrecked. If anything horrible were going to happen to us, it’s my belief those Lemmings would know; and that may be why they’ve fought shy of us.’

  ‘What do you call this country?’ asked the Psammead, suddenly putting its head out of its bag.

  ‘Atlantis,’ said the priest.

  ‘Then I advise you to get on to the highest ground you can find. I remember hearing something about a flood here. Look here, you’—it turned to Anthea; ‘let’s get home. The prospect’s too wet for my whiskers.’ The girls obediently went to find their brothers, who were leaning on the balcony railings.

  ‘Where’s the learned gentleman?’ asked Anthea.

  ‘There he is—below,’ said the priest, who had come with them. ‘Your High Ji-Jimmy is with the Kings.’

  The ten Kings were no longer alone. The learned gentleman—no one had noticed how he got there—stood with them on the steps of an altar, on which lay the dead body of the black bull. All the rest of the courtyard was thick with people, seemingly of all classes, and all were shouting, ‘The sea—the sea!’

  ‘Be calm,’ said the most kingly of the Kings, he who had lassoed the bull. ‘Our town is strong against the thunders of the sea and of the sky!’

  ‘I want to go home,’ whined the Psammead.

  ‘We can’t go without him,’ said Anthea firmly.

  ‘Jimmy,’ she called, ‘Jimmy!’ and waved to him. He heard her, and began to come towards her through the crowd. They could see from the balcony the sea-captain edging his way out from among the people. And his face was dead white, like paper.

  ‘To the hills!’ he cried in a loud and terrible voice. And above his voice came another voice, louder, more terrible—the voice of the sea.

  The girls looked seaward.

  Across the smooth distance of the sea something huge and black rolled towards the town. It was a wave, but a wave a hundred feet in height, a wave that looked like a mountain—a wave rising higher and higher till suddenly it seemed to break in two—one half of it rushed out to sea again; the other—

  ‘Oh!’ cried Anthea, ‘the town—the poor people!’

  ‘It’s all thousands of years ago, really,’ said Robert but his voice trembled. They hid their eyes for a moment. They could not bear to look down, for the wave had broken on the face of the town, sweeping over the quays and docks, overwhelming the great storehouses and factories, tearing gigantic stones from forts and bridges, and using them as battering rams against the temples. Great ships were swept over the roofs of the houses and dashed down halfway up the hill among ruined gardens and broken buildings. The water ground brown fishing-boats to powder on the golden roofs of Palaces.

  Then the wave swept back towards the sea.

  ‘I want to go home,’ cried the Psammead fiercely.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes!’ said Jane, and the boys were ready—but the learned gentleman had not come.
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  Then suddenly they heard him dash up to the inner gallery, crying—

  ‘I must see the end of the dream.’ He rushed up the higher flight.

  The others followed him. They found themselves in a sort of turret—roofed, but open to the air at the sides.

  The learned gentleman was leaning on the parapet, and as they rejoined him the vast wave rushed back on the town. This time it rose higher—destroyed more.

  ‘Come home,’ cried the Psammead; ‘that’s the last, I know it is! That’s the last—over there.’ It pointed with a claw that trembled.

  ‘Oh, come!’ cried Jane, holding up the Amulet.

  ‘I will see the end of the dream,’ cried the learned gentleman.

  ‘You’ll never see anything else if you do,’ said Cyril. ‘Oh, Jimmy!’ appealed Anthea. ‘I’ll never bring you out again!’

  ‘You’ll never have the chance if you don’t go soon,’ said the Psammead.

  ‘I will see the end of the dream,’ said the learned gentleman obstinately.

  The hills around were black with people fleeing from the villages to the mountains. And even as they fled thin smoke broke from the great white peak, and then a faint flash of flame. Then the volcano began to throw up its mysterious fiery inside parts. The earth trembled; ashes and sulphur showered down; a rain of fine pumice-stone fell like snow on all the dry land. The elephants from the forest rushed up towards the peaks; great lizards thirty yards long broke from the mountain pools and rushed down towards the sea. The snows melted and rushed down, first in avalanches, then in roaring torrents. Great rocks cast up by the volcano fell splashing in the sea miles away.

  ‘Oh, this is horrible!’ cried Anthea. ‘Come home, come home!’

  ‘The end of the dream,’ gasped the learned gentleman.

  ‘Hold up the Amulet,’ cried the Psammead suddenly. The place where they stood was now crowded with men and women, and the children were strained tight against the parapet. The turret rocked and swayed; the wave had reached the golden wall.

  Jane held up the Amulet.

  ‘Now,’ cried the Psammead, ‘say the word!’

  And as Jane said it the Psammead leaped from its bag and bit the hand of the learned gentleman.

  At the same moment the boys pushed him through the arch and all followed him.

  He turned to look back, and through the arch he saw nothing but a waste of waters, with above it the peak of the terrible mountain with fire raging from it.

  He staggered back to his chair.

  ‘What a ghastly dream!’ he gasped. ‘Oh, you’re here, my—er—dears. Can I do anything for you?’

  ‘You’ve hurt your hand,’ said Anthea gently; ‘let me bind it up.’

  The hand was indeed bleeding rather badly.

  The Psammead had crept back to its bag. All the children were very white.

  ‘Never again,’ said the Psammead later on, ‘will I go into the Past with a grown-up person! I will say for you four, you do do as you’re told.’

  ‘We didn’t even find the Amulet,’ said Anthea later still.

  ‘Of course you didn’t; it wasn’t there. Only the stone it was made of was there. It fell on to a ship miles away that managed to escape and got to Egypt. I could have told you that.’

  ‘I wish you had,’ said Anthea, and her voice was still rather shaky. ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘You never asked me,’ said the Psammead very sulkily. ‘I’m not the sort of chap to go shoving my oar in where it’s not wanted.’

  ‘Mr Ji-Jimmy’s friend will have something worth having to put in his article now,’ said Cyril very much later indeed.

  ‘Not he,’ said Robert sleepily. ‘The learned Ji-Jimmy will think it’s a dream, and it’s ten to one he never tells the other chap a word about it at all.’

  Robert was quite right on both points. The learned gentleman did. And he never did.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE LITTLE BLACK GIRL AND JULIUS CAESAR

  A great city swept away by the sea, a beautiful country devastated by an active volcano—these are not the sort of things you see every day of the week. And when you do see them, no matter how many other wonders you may have seen in your time, such sights are rather apt to take your breath away. Atlantis had certainly this effect on the breaths of Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane.

  They remained in a breathless state for some days. The learned gentleman seemed as breathless as anyone; he spent a good deal of what little breath he had in telling Anthea about a wonderful dream he had. ‘You would hardly believe,’ he said, ‘that anyone could have such a detailed vision.’

  But Anthea could believe it, she said, quite easily.

  He had ceased to talk about thought-transference. He had now seen too many wonders to believe that.

  In consequence of their breathless condition none of the children suggested any new excursions through the Amulet. Robert voiced the mood of the others when he said that they were ‘fed up’ with Amulet for a bit. They undoubtedly were.

  As for the Psammead, it went to sand and stayed there, worn out by the terror of the flood and the violent exercise it had had to take in obedience to the inconsiderate wishes of the learned gentleman and the Babylonian queen.

  The children let it sleep. The danger of taking it about among strange people who might at any moment utter undesirable wishes was becoming more and more plain.

  And there are pleasant things to be done in London without any aid from Amulets or Psammeads. You can, for instance visit the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, the National Gallery, the Zoological Gardens, the various Parks, the Museums at South Kensington, Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition of Waxworks, or the Botanical Gardens at Kew. You can go to Kew by river steamer—and this is the way that the children would have gone if they had gone at all. Only they never did, because it was when they were discussing the arrangements for the journey, and what they should take with them to eat and how much of it, and what the whole thing would cost, that the adventure of the Little Black Girl began to happen.

  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.

  ‘I’m not; I’m only thinking,’ he answered when Robert asked him what he was so grumpy about. ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve thought it all out.’

  ‘If it’s about the Amulet I don’t want to hear it,’ said Jane.

  ‘Nobody asked you to,’ retorted Cyril mildly, ‘and I haven’t finished my inside thinking about it yet. Let’s go to Kew in the meantime.’

  ‘I’d rather go in a steamer,’ said Robert; and the girls laughed.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Cyril, ‘be funny. I would.’

  ‘Well, he was, rather,’ said Anthea.

  ‘I wouldn’t think, Squirrel, if it hurts you so,’ said Robert kindly.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Cyril, ‘or else talk about Kew.’

  ‘I want to see the palms there,’ said Anthea hastily, ‘to see if they’re anything like the ones on the island where we united the Cook and the Burglar by the Reverend Half-Curate.’

  All disagreeableness was swept away in a pleasant tide of recollections, and ‘Do you remember…?’ they said. ‘Have you forgotten…?’

  ‘My hat!’ remarked Cyril pensively, as the flood of reminiscence ebbed a little; ‘we have had some times.’

  ‘We have that,’ said Robert.<
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  ‘Don’t let’s have any more,’ said Jane anxiously.

  ‘That’s what I was thinking about,’ Cyril replied; and just then they heard the Little Black Girl sniff. She was quite close to them.

  She was not really a little black girl. She was shabby and not very clean, and she had been crying so much that you could hardly see, through the narrow chink between her swollen lids, how very blue her eyes were. It was her dress that was black, and it was too big and too long for her, and she wore a speckled black-ribboned sailor hat that would have fitted a much bigger head than her little flaxen one. And she stood looking at the children and sniffing.

  ‘Oh, dear!’ said Anthea, jumping up. ‘Whatever is the matter?’

  She put her hand on the little girl’s arm. It was rudely shaken off.

  ‘You leave me be,’ said the little girl. ‘I ain’t doing nothing to you.’

  ‘But what is it?’ Anthea asked. ‘Has someone been hurting you?’

  ‘What’s that to you?’ said the little girl fiercely. ‘you’re all right.’

  ‘Come away,’ said Robert, pulling at Anthea’s sleeve. ‘She’s a nasty, rude little kid.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Anthea. ‘She’s only dreadfully unhappy. What is it?’ she asked again.

  ‘Oh, you’re all right,’ the child repeated; ‘you ain’t agoin’ to the Union.’

  ‘Can’t we take you home?’ said Anthea; and Jane added, ‘Where does your mother live?’

  ‘She don’t live nowheres—she’s dead—so now!’ said the little girl fiercely, in tones of miserable triumph. Then she opened her swollen eyes widely, stamped her foot in fury, and ran away. She ran no further than to the next bench, flung herself down there and began to cry without even trying not to.

  Anthea, quite at once, went to the little girl and put her arms as tight as she could round the hunched-up black figure.

  ‘Oh, don’t cry so, dear, don’t, don’t!’ she whispered under the brim of the large sailor hat, now very crooked indeed. ‘Tell Anthea all about it; Anthea’ll help you. There, there, dear, don’t cry.’