ISABEL. Oh, please, please.
L. You are all such wise children, there's no talking to you; you won't believe anything.
LILY. No, we are not wise, and we will believe anything, when you say we ought.
L. Well, it came about this way. Sibyl, do you recollect that evening when we had been looking at your old cave by Cumae, and wondering why you didn't live there still: and then we wondered how old you were; and Egypt said you wouldn't tell, and nobody else could tell but she; and you laughed—I thought very gayly for a Sibyl—and said you would harness a flock of cranes for us, and we might fly over to Egypt if we liked, and see.
SIBYL. Yes, and you went, and couldn't find out after all!
L. Why, you know, Egypt had been just doubling that third pyramid of hers; [Footnote: Note i.] and making a new entrance into it; and a fine entrance it was! First, we had to go through an ante- room, which had both its doors blocked up with stones; and then we had three granite portcullises to pull up, one after another; and the moment we had got under them, Egypt signed to somebody above; and down they came again behind us, with a roar like thunder, only louder; then we got into a passage fit for nobody but rats, and Egypt wouldn't go any further herself, but said we might go on if we liked; and so we came to a hole in the pavement, and then to a granite trap-door—and then we thought we had gone quite far enough, and came back, and Egypt laughed at us.
EGYPT. You would not have had me take my crown off, and stoop all the way down a passage fit only for rats?
L. It was not the crown, Egypt—you know that very well. It was the flounces that would not let you go any further. I suppose, however, you wear them as typical of the inundation of the Nile, so it is all right.
ISABEL. Why didn't you take me with you? Where rats can go, mice can. I wouldn't have come back.
L. No, mousie; you would have gone on by yourself, and you might have waked one of Pasht's cats,[Footnote: Note iii] and it would have eaten you. I was very glad you were not there. But after all this, I suppose the imagination of the heavy granite blocks and the underground ways had troubled me, and dreams are often shaped in a strange opposition to the impressions that have caused them; and from all that we had been reading in Bunsen about stones that couldn't be lifted with levers, I began to dream about stones that lifted themselves with wings.