by E. Nesbit
Pheles, the master of the house, went off that very evening, by the King’s orders, to start on another voyage. And when he was gone his wife found the children amusing company, and kept them talking and singing and dancing till quite late. ‘To distract my mind from my sorrows,’ she said.
‘I do like being a slave,’ remarked Jane cheerfully, as they curled up on the big, soft cushions that were to be their beds.
It was black night when they were awakened, each by a hand passed softly over its face, and a low voice that whispered—
‘Be quiet, or all is lost.’
So they were quiet.
‘It’s me, Rekh-mara, the Priest of Amen,’ said the whisperer. ‘The man who brought us has gone to sea again, and he has taken my Amulet from me by force, and I know no magic to get it back. Is there magic for that in the Amulet you bear?’
Everyone was instantly awake by now.
‘We can go after him,’ said Cyril, leaping up; ‘but he might take ours as well; or he might be angry with us for following him.’
‘I’ll see to that,’ said the Egyptian in the dark. ‘Hide your Amulet well.’
There in the deep blackness of that room in the Tyrian country house the Amulet was once more held up and the word spoken.
All passed through on to a ship that tossed and tumbled on a wind-blown sea. They crouched together there till morning, and Jane and Cyril were not at all well. When the dawn showed, dove-coloured, across the steely waves, they stood up as well as they could for the tumbling of the ship. Pheles, that hardy sailor and adventurer, turned quite pale when he turned round suddenly and saw them.
‘Well!’ he said, ‘well, I never did!’
‘Master,’ said the Egyptian, bowing low, and that was even more difficult than standing up, ‘we are here by the magic of the sacred Amulet that hangs round your neck.’
‘I never did!’ repeated Pheles. ‘Well, well!’
‘What port is the ship bound for?’ asked Robert, with a nautical air.
But Pheles said, ‘Are you a navigator?’ Robert had to own that he was not.
‘Then,’ said Pheles, ‘I don’t mind telling you that we’re bound for the Tin Isles. Tyre alone knows where the Tin Isles are. It is a splendid secret we keep from all the world. It is as great a thing to us as your magic to you.’
He spoke in quite a new voice, and seemed to respect both the children and the Amulet a good deal more than he had done before.
‘The King sent you, didn’t he?’ said Jane.
‘Yes,’ answered Pheles, ‘he bade me set sail with half a score brave gentlemen and this crew. You shall go with us, and see many wonders.’ He bowed and left them.
‘What are we going to do now?’ said Robert, when Pheles had caused them to be left along with a breakfast of dried fruits and a sort of hard biscuit.
‘Wait till he lands in the Tin Isles,’ said Rekh-mara, ‘then we can get the barbarians to help us. We will attack him by night and tear the sacred Amulet from his accursed heathen neck,’ he added, grinding his teeth.
‘When shall we get to the Tin Isles?’ asked Jane.
‘Oh—six months, perhaps, or a year,’ said the Egyptian cheerfully.
‘A year of this?’ cried Jane, and Cyril, who was still feeling far too unwell to care about breakfast, hugged himself miserably and shuddered. It was Robert who said—
‘Look here, we can shorten that year. Jane, out with the Amulet! Wish that we were where the Amulet will be when the ship is twenty miles from the Tin Island. That’ll give us time to mature our plans.’
It was done—the work of a moment—and there they were on the same ship, between grey northern sky and grey northern sea. The sun was setting in a pale yellow line. It was the same ship, but it was changed, and so were the crew. Weather-worn and dirty were the sailors, and their clothes torn and ragged. And the children saw that, of course, though they had skipped the nine months, the ship had had to live through them. Pheles looked thinner, and his face was rugged and anxious.
‘Ha!’ he cried, ‘the charm has brought you back! I have prayed to it daily these nine months—and now you are here? Have you no magic that can help?’
‘What is your need?’ asked the Egyptian quietly.
‘I need a great wave that shall whelm away the foreign ship that follows us. A month ago it lay in wait for us, by the pillars of the gods, and it follows, follows, to find out the secret of Tyre—the place of the Tin Islands. If I could steer by night I could escape them yet, but tonight there will be no stars.’
‘My magic will not serve you here,’ said the Egyptian.
But Robert said, ‘My magic will not bring up great waves, but I can show you how to steer without stars.’
He took out the shilling compass, still, fortunately, in working order, that he had bought off another boy at school for fivepence, a piece of india-rubber, a strip of whalebone, and half a stick of red sealing-wax.
And he showed Pheles how it worked. And Pheles wondered at the compass’s magic truth.
‘I will give it to you,’ Robert said, ‘in return for that charm about your neck.’
Pheles made no answer. He first laughed, snatched the compass from Robert’s hand, and turned away still laughing.
‘Be comforted,’ the Priest whispered, ‘our time will come.’
The dusk deepened, and Pheles, crouched beside a dim lantern, steered by the shilling compass from the Crystal Palace.
No one ever knew how the other ship sailed, but suddenly, in the deep night, the look-out man at the stern cried out in a terrible voice—
‘She is close upon us!’
‘And we,’ said Pheles, ‘are close to the harbour.’ He was silent a moment, then suddenly he altered the ship’s course, and then he stood up and spoke.
‘Good friends and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘who are bound with me in this brave venture by our King’s command, the false, foreign ship is close on our heels. If we land, they land, and only the gods know whether they might not beat us in fight, and themselves survive to carry back the tale of Tyre’s secret island to enrich their own miserable land. Shall this be?’
‘Never!’ cried the half-dozen men near him. The slaves were rowing hard below and could not hear his words.
The Egyptian leaped upon him; suddenly, fiercely, as a wild beast leaps. ‘Give me back my Amulet,’ he cried, and caught at the charm. The chain that held it snapped, and it lay in the Priest’s hand.
Pheles laughed, standing balanced to the leap of the ship that answered the oarstroke.
‘This is no time for charms and mummeries,’ he said. ‘We’ve lived like men, and we’ll die like gentlemen for the honour and glory of Tyre, our splendid city. “Tyre, Tyre for ever! It’s Tyre that rules the waves.” I steer her straight for the Dragon rocks, and we go down for our city, as brave men should. The creeping cowards who follow shall go down as slaves—and slaves they shall be to us—when we live again. Tyre, Tyre for ever!’
A great shout went up, and the slaves below joined in it.
‘Quick, the Amulet,’ cried Anthea, and held it up. Rekh-mara held up the one he had snatched from Pheles. The word was spoken, and the two great arches grew on the plunging ship in the shrieking wind under the dark sky. From each Amulet a great and beautiful green light streamed and shone far out over the waves. It illuminated, too, the black faces and jagged teeth of the great rocks that lay not two ships’ lengths from the boat’s peaked nose.
‘Tyre, Tyre for ever! It’s Tyre that rules the waves!’ the voices of the doomed rose in a triumphant shout. The children scrambled through the arch, and stood trembling and blinking in the Fitzroy Street parlour, and in their ears still sounded the whistle of the wind, and the rattle of the oars, the crash of the ships bow on the rocks, and the last shout of
the brave gentlemen-adventurers who went to their deaths singing, for the sake of the city they loved.
‘And so we’ve lost the other half of the Amulet again,’ said Anthea, when they had told the Psammead all about it.
‘Nonsense, pooh!’ said the Psammead. ‘That wasn’t the other half. It was the same half that you’ve got—the one that wasn’t crushed and lost.’
‘But how could it be the same?’ said Anthea gently.
‘Well, not exactly, of course. The one you’ve got is a good many years older, but at any rate it’s not the other one. What did you say when you wished?’
‘I forget,’ said Jane.
‘I don’t,’ said the Psammead. ‘You said, “Take us where you are”—and it did, so you see it was the same half.’
‘I see,’ said Anthea.
‘But you mark my words,’ the Psammead went on, ‘you’ll have trouble with that Priest yet.’
‘Why, he was quite friendly,’ said Anthea.
‘All the same you’d better beware of the Reverend Rekh-mara.’
‘Oh, I’m sick of the Amulet,’ said Cyril, ‘we shall never get it.’
‘Oh yes we shall,’ said Robert. ‘Don’t you remember December 3rd?’
‘Jinks!’ said Cyril, ‘I’d forgotten that.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Jane, ‘and I don’t feel at all well.’
‘If I were you,’ said the Psammead, ‘I should not go out into the Past again till that date. You’ll find it safer not to go where you’re likely to meet that Egyptian any more just at present.’
‘Of course we’ll do as you say,’ said Anthea soothingly, ‘though there’s something about his face that I really do like.’
‘Still, you don’t want to run after him, I suppose,’ snapped the Psammead. ‘You wait till the 3rd, and then see what happens.’
Cyril and Jane were feeling far from well, Anthea was always obliging, so Robert was overruled. And they promised. And none of them, not even the Psammead, at all foresaw, as you no doubt do quite plainly, exactly what it was that would happen on that memorable date.
CHAPTER 14
THE HEART’S DESIRE
If I only had time I could tell you lots of things. For instance, how, in spite of the advice of the Psammead, the four children did, one very wet day, go through their Amulet Arch into the golden desert, and there find the great Temple of Baalbec and meet with the Phoenix whom they never thought to see again. And how the Phoenix did not remember them at all until it went into a sort of prophetic trance—if that can be called remembering. But, alas! I haven’t time, so I must leave all that out though it was a wonderfully thrilling adventure. I must leave out, too, all about the visit of the children to the Hippodrome with the Psammead in its travelling bag, and about how the wishes of the people round about them were granted so suddenly and surprisingly that at last the Psammead had to be taken hurriedly home by Anthea, who consequently missed half the performance. Then there was the time when, Nurse having gone to tea with a friend out Ivalunk way, they were playing ‘devil in the dark’—and in the midst of that most creepy pastime the postman’s knock frightened Jane nearly out of her life. She took in the letters, however, and put them in the back of the hat-stand drawer, so that they should be safe. And safe they were, for she never thought of them again for weeks and weeks.
One really good thing happened when they took the Psammead to a magic-lantern show and lecture at the boys’ school at Camden Town. The lecture was all about our soldiers in South Africa. And the lecturer ended up by saying, ‘And I hope every boy in this room has in his heart the seeds of courage and heroism and self-sacrifice, and I wish that every one of you may grow up to be noble and brave and unselfish, worthy citizens of this great Empire for whom our soldiers have freely given their lives.’
And, of course, this came true—which was a distinct score for Camden Town.
As Anthea said, it was unlucky that the lecturer said boys, because now she and Jane would have to be noble and unselfish, if at all, without any outside help. But Jane said, ‘I daresay we are already because of our beautiful natures. It’s only boys that have to be made brave by magic’—which nearly led to a first-class row.
And I daresay you would like to know all about the affair of the fishing rod, and the fish-hooks, and the cook next door—which was amusing from some points of view, though not perhaps the cook’s—but there really is no time even for that.
The only thing that there’s time to tell about is the Adventure of Maskelyne and Cooke’s, and the Unexpected Apparition—which is also the beginning of the end.
It was Nurse who broke into the gloomy music of the autumn rain on the window panes by suggesting a visit to the Egyptian Hall, England’s Home of Mystery. Though they had good, but private reasons to know that their own particular personal mystery was of a very different brand, the four all brightened at the idea. All children, as well as a good many grown-ups, love conjuring.
‘It’s in Piccadilly,’ said old Nurse, carefully counting out the proper number of shillings into Cyril’s hand, ‘not so very far down on the left from the Circus. There’s big pillars outside, something like Carter’s seed place in Holborn, as used to be Day and Martin’s blacking when I was a gell. And something like Euston Station, only not so big.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said everybody.
So they started.
But though they walked along the left-hand side of Piccadilly they saw no pillared building that was at all like Carter’s seed warehouse or Euston Station or England’s Home of Mystery as they remembered it.
At last they stopped a hurried lady, and asked her the way to Maskelyne and Cooke’s.
‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ she said, pushing past them. ‘I always shop at the Stores.’ Which just shows, as Jane said, how ignorant grown-up people are.
It was a policeman who at last explained to them that England’s Mysteries are now appropriately enough enacted at St George’s Hall.
So they tramped to Langham Place, and missed the first two items in the programme. But they were in time for the most wonderful magic appearances and disappearances, which they could hardly believe—even with all their knowledge of a larger magic—was not really magic after all.
‘If only the Babylonians could have seen this conjuring,’ whispered Cyril. ‘It takes the shine out of their old conjurer, doesn’t it?’
‘Hush!’ said Anthea and several other members of the audience.
Now there was a vacant seat next to Robert. And it was when all eyes were fixed on the stage where Mr 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-mara, the Priest of Amen!
Though the eyes of the audience were fixed on Mr David Devant, Mr David Devant’s eyes were fixed on the audience. And it happened that his eyes were more particularly fixed on that empty chair. So that he saw quite plainly the sudden appearance, from nowhere, of the Egyptian Priest.
‘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.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Mr Devant, rising to the occasion, ‘this is a trick I have never before performed. The empty seat, third from the end, second row, gallery—you will now find occupied by an Ancient Egyptian, warranted genuine.
’
He little knew how true his words were.
And now all eyes were turned on the Priest and the children, and the whole audience, after a moment’s breathless surprise, shouted applause. Only the lady on the other side of Rekh-mara drew back a little. She knew no one had passed her, and, as she said later, over tea and cold tongue, ‘it was that sudden it made her flesh creep.’
Rekh-mara seemed very much annoyed at the notice he was exciting.
‘Come out of this crowd,’ he whispered to Robert. ‘I must talk with you apart.’
‘Oh, no,’ Jane whispered. ‘I did so want to see the Mascot Moth, and the Ventriloquist.’
‘How did you get here?’ was Robert’s return whisper.
‘How did you get to Egypt and to Tyre?’ retorted Rekh-mara. ‘Come, let us leave this crowd.’
‘There’s no help for it, I suppose,’ Robert shrugged angrily. But they all got up.
‘Confederates!’ said a man in the row behind. ‘Now they go round to the back and take part in the next scene.’
‘I wish we did,’ said Robert.
‘Confederate yourself!’ said Cyril. And so they got away, the audience applauding to the last.
In the vestibule of St George’s Hall they disguised Rekh-mara as well as they could, but even with Robert’s hat and Cyril’s Inverness cape he was too striking a figure for foot-exercise in the London streets. It had to be a cab, and it took the last, least money of all of them. They stopped the cab a few doors from home, and then the girls went in and engaged old Nurse’s attention by an account of the conjuring and a fervent entreaty for dripping-toast with their tea, leaving the front door open so that while Nurse was talking to them the boys could creep quietly in with Rekh-mara and smuggle him, unseen, up the stairs into their bedroom.
When the girls came up they found the Egyptian Priest sitting on the side of Cyril’s bed, his hands on his knees, looking like a statue of a king.