“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?”