“How are you going to do it?” cried a voice.
“You look out,” cried another, “or you’ll get yourself into trouble.”
“I’ve heard almost every single word of that,” whispered Robert, “in Hyde Park last Sunday!”
“Let us strike for more bread and onions and beer, and a longer mid-day rest,” the speaker went on. “You are tired, you are hungry, you are thirsty. You are poor, your wives and children are pining for food. The barns of the rich are full to bursting with the corn we want, the corn our labour has grown. To the granaries!”
“To the granaries!” cried half the crowd; but another voice shouted clear above the tumult, “To Pharaoh! To the King! Let’s present a petition to the King! He will listen to the voice of the oppressed!”
For a moment the crowd swayed one way and another—first towards the granaries and then towards the palace. Then, with a rush like that of an imprisoned torrent suddenly set free, it surged along the street towards the palace, and the children were carried with it. Anthea found it difficult to keep the Psammead from being squeezed very uncomfortably.
The crowd swept through the streets of dull-looking houses with few windows, very high up, across the market where people were not buying but exchanging goods. In a momentary pause Robert saw a basket of onions exchanged for a hair comb and five fish for a string of beads. The people in the market seemed better off than those in the crowd; they had finer clothes, and more of them. They were the kind of people who, nowadays, would have lived at Brixton or Brockley.
“What’s the trouble now?” a languid, large-eyed lady in a crimped, half-transparent linen dress, with her black hair very much braided and puffed out, asked of a date-seller.
“Oh, the working-men—discontented as usual,” the man answered. “Listen to them. Anyone would think it mattered whether they had a little more or less to eat. Dregs of society!” said the date-seller.
“Scum!” said the lady.