Jane with trembling hands held up the charm towards the East, and Cyril spoke the word of power. The Amulet grew to a great arch.
Out beyond it was the glaring Egyptian sky, the broken wall, the cruel, dark, big-nosed face with the red, wet knife in its gleaming teeth. Within the arch was the dull, faint, greeny-brown of London grass and trees.
'Hold tight, Jane!' Cyril cried, and he dashed through the arch, dragging Anthea and the Psammead after him. Robert followed, clutching Jane. And in the ears of each, as they passed through the arch of the charm, the sound and fury of battle died out suddenly and utterly, and they heard only the low, dull, discontented hum of vast London, and the peeking and patting of the sparrows on the gravel and the voices of the ragged baby children playing Ring-o'-Roses on the yellow trampled grass. And the charm was a little charm again in Jane's hand, and there was the basket with their dinner and the bathbuns lying just where they had left it.
'My hat!' said Cyril, drawing a long breath; 'that was something like an adventure.'
'It was rather like one, certainly,' said the Psammead.
They all lay still, breathing in the safe, quiet air of Regent's Park.
'We'd better go home at once,' said Anthea presently. 'Old Nurse will be most frightfully anxious. The sun looks about the same as it did when we started yesterday. We've been away twenty-four hours.' 'The buns are quite soft still,' said Cyril, feeling one;
'I suppose the dew kept them fresh.'
They were not hungry, curiously enough.
They picked up the dinner-basket and the Psammead-basket, and went straight home.
Old Nurse met them with amazement.
'Well, if ever I did!' she said. 'What's gone wrong? You've soon tired of your picnic.'
The children took this to be bitter irony, which means saying the exact opposite of what you mean in order to make yourself disagreeable; as when you happen to have a dirty face, and someone says, 'How nice and clean you look!'
'We're very sorry,' began Anthea, but old Nurse said--'Oh, bless me, child, I don't care! Please yourselves and you'll please me. Come in and get your dinners comf'table. I've got a potato on a-boiling.'
When she had gone to attend to the potatoes the children looked at each other. Could it be that old Nurse had so changed that she no longer cared that they should have been away from home for twenty-four hours--all night in fact--without any explanation whatever?
But the Psammead put its head out of its basket and said--'What's the matter? Don't you understand? You come back through the charm-arch at the same time as you go through it. This isn't tomorrow!' 'Is it still yesterday?' asked Jane.
'No, it's today. The same as it's always been. It wouldn't do to go mixing up the present and the Past, and cutting bits out of one to fit into the other.'
'Then all that adventure took no time at all?'
'You can call it that if you like,' said the Psammead. 'It took none of the modern time, anyhow.'
That evening Anthea carried up a steak for the learned gentleman's dinner. She persuaded Beatrice, the maid-of-all-work, who had given her the bangle with the blue stone, to let her do it. And she stayed and talked to him, by special invitation, while he ate the dinner.
She told him the whole adventure, beginning with--'This afternoon we found ourselves on the bank of the River Nile,' and ending up with, 'And then we remembered how to get back, and there we were in Regent's Park, and it hadn't taken any time at all.'
She did not tell anything about the charm or the Psammead, because that was forbidden, but the story was quite wonderful enough even as it was to entrance the learned gentleman.
'You are a most unusual little girl,' he said. 'Who tells you all these things?'
'No one,' said Anthea, 'they just happen.'
'Make-believe,' he said slowly, as one who recalls and pronounces a long-forgotten word.
He sat long after she had left him. At last he roused himself with a start.
'I really must take a holiday,' he said; 'my nerves must be all out of order. I actually have a perfectly distinct impression that the little girl from the rooms below came in and gave me a coherent and graphic picture of life as I conceive it to have been in pre-dynastic Egypt. Strange what tricks the mind will play! I shall have to be more careful.'
He finished his bread conscientiously, and actually went for a mile walk before he went back to his work.
