me since I couldn’t come down to you – eh?” And then - P. L. Travers

"I thought, Sir," Jane said to the King Cobra, "that lions and birds, and tigers and little animals are natural enemies."

"You are right. But not on the Birthday," said the King Cobra. "Tonight the small are free from the great and the great protect the small. Even I can meet a Goose without any thought2 of dinner."

When I write it’s more a process of listening. I don’t pretend that there is some spirit standing beside me that tells me things. More and more I’ve become convinced that the great treasure to possess is the unknown. I’m going to write, I hope, a lot about that. It’s with my unknowing that I come to the myths. If I came to them knowing, I would have nothing to learn. But I bring my unknowing, which is a tangible thing, a clear space, something that’s been made room for out of the muddle of ordinary psychic stuff, an empty space.

But at the very moment she was thinking these thoughts, adventure, as she afterwards told my Mother, was stalking her.