Description
The Story of the Amulet
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
Product ID: 9781776783236
Sku: 9781776783236
