don't try to climb down the edges, but go the slow safe way round
by the road, as if you were a cart.

Each of the children carried its own spade, and took it in turns to
carry the Lamb. He was the baby, and they called him that because
'Baa' was the first thing he ever said. They called Anthea
'Panther', which seems silly when you read it, but when you say it
it sounds a little like her name.

The gravel-pit is very large and wide, with grass growing round the
edges at the top, and dry stringy wildflowers, purple and yellow.
It is like a giant's wash-hand basin. And there are mounds of
gravel, and holes in the sides of the basin where gravel has been
taken out, and high up in the steep sides there are the little
holes that are the little front doors of the little sand-martins'
little houses.

The children built a castle, of course, but castle-building is
rather poor fun when you have no hope of the swishing tide ever
coming in to fill up the moat and wash away the drawbridge, and, at
the happy last, to wet everybody up to the waist at least.

Cyril wanted to dig out a cave to play smugglers in, but the others
thought it might bury them alive, so it ended in all spades going
to work to dig a hole through the castle to Australia. These
children, you see, believed that the world was round, and that on
the other side the little Australian boys and girls were really
walking wrong way up, like flies on the ceiling, with their heads
hanging down into the air.