this dazzling interval Anthea felt for the
charm and pushed it inside Jane's frock, so that it might be quite safe.
When their eyes got used to the new wonderful light the children looked
around them. The sky was very, very blue, and it sparkled and glittered
and dazzled like the sea at home when the sun shines on it.

They were standing on a little clearing in a thick, low forest; there
were trees and shrubs and a close, thorny, tangly undergrowth. In
front of them stretched a bank of strange black mud, then came the
browny-yellowy shining ribbon of a river. Then more dry, caked mud and
more greeny-browny jungle. The only things that told that human people
had been there were the clearing, a path that led to it, and an odd
arrangement of cut reeds in the river.

They looked at each other.

'Well!' said Robert, 'this IS a change of air!'

It was. The air was hotter than they could have imagined, even in London
in August.

'I wish I knew where we were,' said Cyril.

'Here's a river, now--I wonder whether it's the Amazon or the Tiber, or
what.'

'It's the Nile,' said the Psammead, looking out of the fish-bag.

'Then this is Egypt,' said Robert, who had once taken a geography prize.

'I don't see any crocodiles,' Cyril objected. His prize had been for
natural history.

The Psammead reached out a hairy arm from its basket and pointed to a
heap of mud at the edge of the water.

'What do you call that?' it said; and as it spoke the heap of mud slid
into the river just as a slab of damp mixed mortar will slip from a
bricklayer's trowel.

'Oh!' said everybody.

There was a crashing among the reeds on the other side of the water.

'And there's a river-horse!' said the Psammead, as a great beast like an
enormous slaty-blue slug showed itself against the black bank on the far
side of the stream.

'It's a hippopotamus,' said Cyril; 'it seems much more real somehow than
the one at the Zoo, doesn't it?'

'I'm glad it's being real on the other side of the river,' said Jane.
And now there was a crackling of reeds and twigs behind them. This was
horrible. Of course it might be another hippopotamus, or a crocodile, or
a lion--or, in fact, almost anything.

'Keep your hand on the charm, Jane,' said Robert hastily. 'We ought to
have a means of escape handy. I'm dead certain this is the sort of place
where simply anything might happen to us.'

'I believe a hippopotamus is going to happen to us,' said Jane--'a very,