The Psammead ought to have been touched by this proof of confidence. Perhaps, however, it looked upon it as a proof of doubt, for it merely snarled—
“If you don’t go now I’ll never help you again.”
“_Oh_,” whispered Anthea, “dear Jane, don’t! Think of Father and Mother and all of us getting our heart’s desire. And we can go back any minute. Come on!”
“Besides,” said Cyril, in a low voice, “the Psammead must know there’s no danger or it wouldn’t go. It’s not so over and above brave itself. Come on!”
As they got nearer to the browny fence they saw that it was a great hedge about eight feet high, made of piled-up thorn bushes.
“To keep out foes and wild beasts,” said the girl.
“I should think it ought to, too,” said he. “Why, some of the thorns are as long as my foot.”
There was an opening in the hedge, and they followed the girl through it. A little way further on was another hedge, not so high, also of dry thorn bushes, very prickly and spiteful-looking, and within this was a sort of village of huts.
There were no gardens and no roads. Just huts built of wood and twigs and clay, and roofed with great palm-leaves, dumped down anywhere. The doors of these houses were very low, like the doors of dog-kennels. The ground between them was not paths or streets, but just yellow sand trampled very hard and smooth.
In the middle of the village there was a hedge that enclosed what seemed to be a piece of ground about as big as their own garden in Camden Town.
No sooner were the children well within the inner thorn hedge than dozens of men and women and children came crowding round from behind and inside the huts.
The girl stood protectingly in front of the four children, and said—
“They are wonder-children from beyond the desert. They bring marvellous gifts, and I have said that it is peace between us and them.”
She held out her arm with the Lowther Arcade bangle on it.
The children from London, where nothing now surprises anyone, had never before seen so many people look so astonished.
They crowded round the children, touching their clothes, their shoes, the buttons on the boys’ jackets, and the coral of the girls’ necklaces.
“We come,” said Cyril, with some dim remembrance of a dreadful day when he had had to wait in an outer office while his father interviewed a solicitor, and there had been nothing to read but the _Daily Telegraph_—“we come from the world where the sun never sets. And peace with honour is what we want. We are the great Anglo-Saxon or conquering race. Not that we want to conquer _you_,” he added hastily. “We only want to look at your houses and your—well, at all you’ve got here, and then we shall return to our own place, and tell of all that we have seen so that your name may be famed.”