The Story of the Amulet | Page 3

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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,