“Do you have cats here then?” asked Kathleen, whose attention had wandered, and had only caught a word that sounded like Pussies.
“Only Octopussies,” said the Princess, “but then they’re eight times as pussy as your dry-land cats.”
What Kathleen’s attention had wandered to was a tall lady standing on a marble pedestal in the middle of a pool. She held a big vase over her head, and from it poured a thin stream of water. This stream fell in an arch right across the pool into a narrow channel cut in the marble of the square in which they now stood, ran across the square, and disappeared under a dark arch in the face of the rock.
“There,” said the Princess, stopping.
“What is it?” asked Reuben, who had been singularly silent.
“This,” she said simply, “is the source of the Nile. And of all other rivers. And it’s my turn now. I must not speak again till my term of source-service is at an end. Do what you will. Go where you will. All is yours. Only beware that you do not touch the sky. If once profane hands touch the sky the whole heaven is overwhelmed.”
She ran a few steps, jumped, and landed on the marble pedestal without touching the lady who stood there already. Then, with the utmost care, so that the curved arc of the water should not be slackened or diverted, she took the vase in her hands and the other lady in her turn leaped across the pool and stood beside the children and greeted them kindly.
“I am Maia. My sister has told me all you did for her,” she said; “it was I who pinched your foot,” and as she spoke they knew the voice that had said, among the seaweed-covered rocks at Beachfield: “Save her. We die in captivity.”
“What will you do?” she asked, “while my sister performs her source-service?”
“Wait, I suppose,” said Bernard. “You see we want to know about going home.”