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94 pages

English

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When Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane find the Psammead, a magical sand fairy, in a pet shop in London, they have no idea that they are about to embark on their greatest adventure yet. The Psammead leads them to an Egyptian amulet that has the power to grant whatever their hearts desire. The problem is that the amulet is broken, and the other half - needed if their wishes are to be granted - is lost. Yet with their half of the amulet able to transport them through time, the children set out on a search for the missing half, and the realization of their wildest dreams...From an encounter with Julius Caesar to a visit of the lost city of Atlantis, The Story of the Amulet - the final instalment in the Psammead Trilogy - is an unforgettable tale of magic and time travel that has been loved by children and parents alike for more than a century.

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Publié par	Alma Books
Date de parution	15 février 2019
Nombre de lectures	5
EAN13	9780714549460
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Story of the Amulet
E. Nesbit
Illustrated by Ella Okstad

ALMA CLASSICS

alma classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
The Story of the Amulet first published in 1906 This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2018
Cover image and chapter heading illustrations © Ella Okstad, 2018 Illustrations on pp. 27 , 32 , 67 , 111 and 116 by H.R. Millar
Extra Material © Alma Books Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR 0 4 YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-790-1
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents
The Story of the Amulet
Chapter 1: The Psammead
Chapter 2 : The Half-Amulet
Chapter 3: The Past
Chapter 4: Eight Thousand Years Ago
Chapter 5: The Fight in the Village
Chapter 6: The Way to Babylon
Chapter 7: “The Deepest Dungeon below the Castle Moat”
Chapter 8 : The Queen in London
Chapter 9: Atlantis
Chapter 10: The Little Black Girl and Julius Caesar
Chapter 11: Before Pharaoh
Chapter 12: The Sorry-Present and the Expelled Little Boy
Chapter 13: The Shipwreck on the Tin Islands
Chapter 14: The Heart’s Desire
Notes
Extra Material for Young Readers
The Writer
The Book
The Main Characters
Other Famous Stories Involving Wishes
Test Yourself
Glossary

To
Dr Wallis Budge
of
the british museum
this book is dedicated
as a small token of gratitude for his
unfailing kindness and help in
the making of it

The Story of the Amulet

Chapter 1
The Psammead

T here were once four children who spent their summer holidays in a white house happily situated between a sandpit and a chalk pit. 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, or something like that, was its name. And Mother, poor dear Mother, was away in Madeira, because she had been very ill. And the Lamb – I mean the baby – was with her. And Aunt Emma, who was Mother’s sister, had suddenly married Uncle Reginald, who was Father’s brother, and they had gone to China, which is much too far off for you to expect to be asked to spend the holidays in, however fond your aunt and uncle may be of you. So the children were left in the care of old Nurse, who lived in Fitzroy Street, near the British Museum, and though she was always very kind to them, and indeed spoilt them far more than would be good for the most grown-up of us, the four children felt perfectly wretched, and when the cab had driven off with Father and all his boxes and guns and the sheepskin with blankets and the aluminium mess kit inside it, the stoutest heart quailed and the girls broke down altogether and sobbed in each other’s arms, while the boys each looked out of one of the long gloomy windows of the parlour and tried to pretend that no boy would be such a muff as to cry.
I hope you notice that they were not cowardly enough to cry till their father had gone. They knew he had quite enough to upset him without that. But when he was gone, everyone felt as if it had been trying not to cry all its life, and that it must cry now, if it died for it. So they cried.
Tea – with shrimps and watercress – cheered them a little. The watercress was arranged in a hedge round a fat glass salt cellar, a tasteful device they had never seen before. But it was not a cheerful meal.
After tea Anthea went up to the room that had been Father’s, and when she saw how dreadfully he wasn’t there and remembered how every minute was taking him further and further from her, and nearer and nearer to the guns of the Russians, she cried a little more. Then she thought of Mother, ill and alone, and perhaps at that very moment wanting a little girl to put eau de Cologne on her head and make her sudden cups of tea, and she cried more than ever. And then she remembered what Mother had said, the night before she went away, about Anthea being the eldest girl, and about trying to make the others happy, and things like that. So she stopped crying and thought instead. And when she had thought as long as she could bear, she washed her face and combed her hair, and went down to the others, trying her best to look as though crying were an exercise she had never even heard of.
She found the parlour in deepest gloom, hardly relieved at all by the efforts of Robert, who, to make the time pass, was pulling Jane’s hair – not hard, but just enough to tease.
“Look here,” said Anthea. “Let’s have a palaver.”
This word dated from the awful day when Cyril had carelessly wished that there were Red Indians in England – and there had been. The word brought back memories of last summer holidays and everyone groaned. They thought of the white house with the beautiful tangled garden – late roses, asters, marigold, sweet mignonette and feathery asparagus – of the wilderness which someone had once meant to make into an orchard, but which was now, as Father said, “five acres of thistles haunted by the ghosts of baby cherry trees”. They thought of the view across the valley, where the lime kilns looked like Aladdin’s palaces in the sunshine, and they thought of their own sandpit, with its fringe of yellowy grasses and pale stringy-stalked wild flowers, and the little holes in the cliff that were the little sand martins’ little front doors. And they thought of the free fresh air smelling of thyme and sweet briar, and the scent of the woodsmoke from the cottages in the lane – and they looked round old Nurse’s stuffy parlour, and Jane said:
“Oh, how different it all is!”
It was. Old Nurse had been in the habit of letting lodgings till Father gave her the children to take care of. And her rooms were furnished “for letting”. Now it is a very odd thing that no one ever seems to furnish a room “for letting” in a bit the same way as one would furnish it for living in. This room had heavy dark-red stuff curtains – the colour that blood would not make a stain on – with coarse lace curtains inside. The carpet was yellow and violet, with bits of grey and brown oilcloth in odd places. The fireplace had shavings and tinsel in it. There was a very varnished mahogany