Phredde and the Purple Pyramid

by Jackie French

  ‘We won’t,’ Phredde assured her.

  We watched Fluffy beetle her way down the tunnel till she was finally lost in the gloom. Then Phredde glanced down at the magic carpet. ‘You know, we may as well stay on this,’ she said.

  ‘Good idea,’ I said.

  It was much easier after that.

  I sat back on the carpet and watched the tunnel whizz by. It seemed a lot longer than two weeks since we’d been down this way. ‘Hey, hold it!’ I yelled.

  The carpet skidded to a stop.

  I gazed at a stone tablet in the dust. It read:

  Come back soon, you lot! We love you! Signed, Fluffy, Queen of the Nile.

  I grinned. ‘.’ I told her. Then the magic carpet carried us home.

  Chapter 28

  The Volcano Goes Boom!

  Well, back to school, anyway.

  We zoomed out of the tunnel and climbed off the carpet.

  Everyone was still exactly as we left them, frozen in time. Mrs Olsen, Amelia, Edwin and all the other kids stood like statues. Even the school pigeons were still. The flames above our classroom looked like they’d been painted on the sky. The boiling lava looked like it had frozen solid, and its steam had frozen too.

  ‘Bother,’ said Phredde gloomily. ‘Boring old school.’

  PING! The tunnel vanished.

  PING! The magic carpet was gone too.

  ‘Oh well, here goes the end of the adventure,’ said Phredde, even more gloomily.

  PING!

  Everything started to move again. The lava edged across the netball court and the flames from our classroom licked the sky and all our class kept trudging down to the library and …

  ‘Pru!’ screamed Mrs Olsen.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, surprised. There was no way she could have guessed we’d been in Ancient Egypt for two weeks, was there?

  ‘What are you wearing!’ demanded Mrs Olsen.

  I looked down. ‘Oh,’ I said. I still had my silk dress and golden sandals and diamond and ruby toe rings and my hair was still done Ancient Egyptian style.

  ‘And Phredde! And Bruce!’ Mrs Olsen stared at Phredde’s dress and hair and Bruce’s jewellery. ‘What on earth is going on?’ she demanded suspiciously.

  ‘Well …’ I said, searching my brains frantically.

  ‘It’s for my term project,’ said Bruce hurriedly. ‘The one on Ancient Egypt. You know how Phredde PING!ed up a giant octopus for her project? Well, I thought it’d be cool if I dressed up the three of us in Ancient Egyptian clothes! I hope I did it correctly,’ he added, looking worried.

  Mrs Olsen beamed at us. ‘What a lovely idea, Bruce!’ she said. ‘I’m sure you look absolutely perfect!’

  Well, I was sure we looked perfect. But I wasn’t going to explain how I knew.

  That’s when the volcano really exploded.

  ‘!’ I said.

  Chapter 29

  Back Home

  It was okay. Phredde PING!ed the whole school 1000 metres in the air at the first roar.

  Of course it WAS pretty cold up there, and some of the kindergarteners got a bit scared and the school pigeons were so startled they did ten years’ doo-doo in one drop, but really everyone took it pretty well. As Mrs Allen, our headmistress, said, ‘The school is getting used to things like this.’

  Then she started laughing in a funny sort of way and told Mrs Olsen she was taking a long, long holiday where there weren’t any volcanoes or ogres or dragons and would someone please send her the ‘jobs vacant’ ads.

  There wasn’t much left of the school after the volcano exploded, of course, but that didn’t matter because Phredde’s mum PING!ed the classrooms back again when she came to pick Phredde up. (Or down, as we were still at 1000 metres. You get a GREAT view from there). And she got rid of the volcano, too, as it was a little bit unreliable.

  ‘What do you think I should give the school to replace it?’ she asked me. ‘I don’t want to give you a boring bell again.’

  ‘How about a pair of hippopotamuses?’ I suggested. ‘They can roar every time we have to go into class!’

  So she did. Their names are Daisy and Tinkerbelle and we are the first school in our region to have our very own pet hippopotamuses, and now they’ve got their own swamp down by the oval, after Mrs Allen said firmly they could not live in the swimming pool anymore.

  That was before she flew off to Tahiti. Or was it Hawaii? No, it can’t have been Hawaii because they have volcanoes there, too. Come to think of it, Mrs Allen forgot to give us her address.

  And that was the end of that adventure.

  I think.

  I sometimes wonder, though.

  Just a month ago, I was in the library leafing through this book on Egypt. Modern Egypt, not Ancient Egypt.

  There were lots of cool pictures of boats on the Nile and the Aswan Dam and camels and big buildings in Cairo, and I wondered what King Narmer and Fluffy would have thought of everything that has happened to their country in the last five thousand years, and I was getting just a bit homesick, well, Ancient Egypt sick, and wishing we could visit Narmer and Fluffy and old Sennufer …

  And then I turned the page and there was this picture of the pyramids. You know, I was sure they weren’t purple before!

  And that photo of the sphinx too — didn’t it once have the body of a lion, not a beetle? And didn’t it have a man’s head, not the face of a giant frog?

  A bit like Bruce, in fact.

  But then I thought, nah, no way could we have changed history.

  And then I went out to footie training because we really needed all the practice we could get because of the match we have to play next month with all those vampires and it’s going to be really bad if we lose!

  But that’s another story.18

  Author’s Notes

  Phredde and the Purple Pyramid is set in very early Ancient Egypt, about 3300 or 3200 BC, when Egypt was a series of cities along the Nile, each with their own king. King Narmer (or Menes) united Upper and Lower Egypt (an inscribed mace — a heavy thing to bong your enemies with — says Narmer captured 120,000 men, 400,000 oxen and 1,422,000 goats) and became the first of Egypt’s pharaohs or ‘god kings’.

  When Narmer’s grave was excavated by the English archaeologist Sir Flinders Petri he found beautifully carved ivory and alabaster palace furniture and gold jewellery inscribed with the name ‘Narmer’, and ebony inscribed with some of the oldest writing in the world.

  Narmer was buried near where he was born, at Abydos, in Upper Egypt, but he established his capital at Memphis, near the modern city of Cairo. Memphis was Egypt’s capital for the next thousand years.

  Not much else is known about King Narmer, so he probably didn’t have a murderous brother and sister or a pet beetle called Fluffy, or invent things. Even the Ancient Egyptians that most of us think were really ancient, like Tutankhamen and Cleopatra, would have thought Narmer was ancient history too! He was about as far back in their history as Julius Caesar or Cleopatra are for us.

  The very, very Ancient Egyptians came from the south, from a land they called Punt, which was probably where Somalia is today. They found a rich valley of reedy marshes filled with wild birds and hippopotamuses and crocodiles.

  In winter and spring the Nile wound its way slowly through the desert. But in July — mid-summer — as the tropical rains fell on the mountains far away in what’s now called Ethiopia, the river swelled and flooded the valley and brought rich soil down, in which the Ancient Egyptians grew their crops in November, when the floods subsided. The Ancient Egyptian farmers didn’t need to plough or weed or dig to grow their wheat and barley — they just threw their seed into the rich wet mud and let it grow.

  But they were incredible farmers in other ways. As the floods washed away everything in their path — even the villages had to be built up on mounds of dirt out of the reach of the floods — trees and orchards had to be planted where the flood waters wouldn’t destroy them.

  As it rar
ely rains in Egypt, crops were watered with an extraordinary system of channels that brought the water from the river using a ‘shaduf’. A shaduf is a long pole balanced over a mud wall. On one end is a bucket of heavy mud. The bucket on the other end is dipped into the river, then the weight of the mud hauls it up again, and the bucket is tipped into the irrigation channel. In some places shadufs are still used today.

  Many trees were surrounded by their own mud pit and mud walls, to collect the water around the tree. Vegetables and herbs were also grown in between mud walls.

  While the floods were high, Egypt was a lake with little islands of villages and trees. Between July and October when the flood waters went down, the world was black with mud. From January to March it was a green carpet with flowers and vegetables, and from April to June the wheat and barley ripened and the fields were gold.

  Gardening and farming was hard work — gardeners not only had to shift water to the garden, but cart mud and soil, hoe the vegetables, flowers and herbs, and build mud walls to keep in the water and keep out wild goats, wolves and hyenas. They also had to keep the irrigation channels clear and cart away sand blown in from the desert that surrounds Egypt. But the gardeners and farmers of the Nile were so skilled that in later centuries Egyptian gardeners were in demand all over the Mediterranean world.

  Pyramids

  The Great Pyramid was built about 2500 BC, nearly one thousand years after Narmer lived. The Great Pyramid was designed to be 146 metres high — as tall as a fifty-storey building — and was made from over two million giant blocks of granite and limestone cut from enormous quarries. It was built mostly by free labourers — specialist builders and farmers who had spare time during the floods, not by slaves.

  Mummies

  The Ancient Egyptians didn’t wrap their mummies in bandages in Prince Narmer’s day — that came later. But the Ancient Egyptian mummies lasted so long because of the very dry climate — not because they were mummified! Some really, really ancient bodies from King Narmer’s time or even earlier have survived (they even have their skin and hair) and they were just buried in dry sandy graves, whereas many mummies in more modern but damp tombs rotted away.

  Ancient Egyptian writing

  The Ancient Eyptians and the Ancient Persians were possibly the first to invent writing. This happened about 3400 BC, or not long before Pru and Phredde and Bruce visited Ancient Egypt.

  At first this early writing was a series of pictures drawn on wet clay with a sharp bit of reed. The clay was then allowed to dry and harden. These early pictures would have helped people record how much grain was stored, or how far the last Nile flood had spread.

  Gradually the pictures became symbols: a picture of two trees in a tub meant an orchard, an ear of barley meant a container of grain. Later, different symbols came to stand for sounds as well as letters, just like our modern alphabet — 2000 years before any other nation used an alphabet.

  These ‘hieroglyphs’ were also carved on stone and many have lasted till today, along with the ‘shorthand’ demotic writing that was also used. The secrets of hieroglyphic writing were lost for thousands of years until Robert Young and J. F. Champollion deciphered the Ancient Egyptian written language in the 1800s.

  You can teach yourself how to write in hieroglyphs on the opposite page.

  The paper made in Ancient Egypt may have been the first in the world. It was made from papyrus reeds, which were left to soak till all the green stuff went rotten and then pressed till the fibres matted together. (You can grow your own papyrus if you have a pond at school, and make your own paper too, but it’s pretty messy. The rotting papyrus reeds also stink.)

  P.S. Printing with wooden blocks and books were probably invented by the ancient Chinese — their oldest book was printed in about 868 AD, when in the rest of the world it might have taken a scribe or a monk over a year to copy something of the same length by hand.

  Passionfruit

  Passionfruit weren’t known in Ancient Egypt — they come from South America — but they are the most purple fruit I know, though not quite as purple as Pru’s pyramid!

  Key to Hieroglyphs

  About the Author

  Jackie French loves purple too; also pyramids and passionfruit, but she has never wandered down a mysterious time tunnel — for which her family is very grateful, especially at dinner time. (Her wombats aren’t grateful at all. Wombats don’t do grateful.)

  Jackie has written about 112 books, which would also have been difficult to do without a computer in Ancient Egypt.

  Books by Jackie French

  Wacky Families Series

  1. My Dog the Dinosaur

  2. My Mum the Pirate

  3. My Dad the Dragon (June 2004)

  4. My Uncle Gus the Garden Gnome (June 2004)

  Outlands Trilogy

  In the Blood • Blood Moon • Flesh and Blood (April 2004)

  Historical

  Somewhere Around the Corner • Dancing with Ben Hall Soldier on the Hill • Daughter of the Regiment Hitler’s Daughter • Lady Dance How the Finnegans Saved the Ship • The White Ship Valley of Gold • Nicholas Appleby, Convict Boy (May 2004)

  Fiction

  Rain Stones • Walking the Boundaries The Secret Beach • Summerland Beyond the Boundaries • A Wombat Named Bosco The Book of Unicorns • The Warrior – The Story of a Wombat Tajore Arkle • Missing You, Love Sara • Dark Wind Blowing Ride the Wild Wind: The Golden Pony and Other Stories

  Non-fiction

  Seasons of Content • How the Aliens From Alpha Centauri Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me into a Writer How to Guzzle Your Garden • The Book of Challenges Stamp, Stomp, Whomp (and other interesting ways to get rid of pests) The Fascinating History of Your Lunch Big Burps, Bare Bums and other Bad-Mannered Blunders Read it Right (February 2004)

  Picture Books

  Diary of a Wombat • Pete the Sheep (October 2004)

  * * *

  Visit Jackie’s website

  www.jackiefrench.com

  or

  www.harpercollins.com.au/jackiefrench

  for copies of her monthly newsletter

  * * *

  Copyright

  Angus&Robertson

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  First published in Australia in 2003

  This edition published in 2014

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Pty Ltd

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  A member of the HarperCollinsPublishers (Australia) Pty Limited Group

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Jackie French 2003

  Illustrations copyright © Mitch Vane 2003

  The right of Jackie French to be identified as the moral rights author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Cth).

  This book is copyright.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

  Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  2 Bloor Street East, 20th floor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada

  195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  French, Jackie.

  Phredde and the purple pyramid.

  ISBN 0 207 19934 5 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978 1 4607 0389 2 (epub)

  I. Title. (Series: French, Jackie. Phredde; no. 6).

  A823.3

  Cover and internal illustrations by Mitch Vane

  Cover and internal design by Gayna Murphy, HarperCollins Desi
gn Studio

  1 See Phredde and the Leopard-skin Librarian.

  2 See ‘Phredde’s Dragon’ in A Phaery Named Phredde.

  3 See Phredde and the Temple of Gloom.

  4 See Phredde and the Leopard-skin Librarian.

  5 See Phredde and the Leopard-skin Librarian.

  6 Psst! Work out the messages throughout the story from the Key to Hieroglyphs on page 133 — Jackie.

  7 They’re called loin cloths because they go around your loins and I’m not explaining what loins are. They’re as bad as frog sex lessons! — Pru.

  8 Date palms, figs, pines with edible nuts, tamarinds, pomegranates and carob trees — Jackie.

  9 Grape vines grown through the fruit trees — Jackie.

  10 See Phredde and the Leopard-skin Librarian.

  11 I used to swear heaps better than ‘heck’ but something weird happened to me in Phaeryland. No one can swear in Phaeryland — Prue.

  12 Purple nut grass tubers. You won’t find them in the supermarket, though. Like lots of ancient foods, they aren’t eaten much now — Jackie.

  13 See Phredde and the Temple of Gloom.

  14 See Phredde and the Leopard-skin Librarian.

  15 A bit like prime minister — Jackie.

  16 An aurochs is a wild bull — Jackie.

  17 See Phredde and the Temple of Gloom.

  18 See Phredde and the Vampire Footie Team in November 2004.