Roald Dahl - James and the Giant Peach

"Is it awful?" they asked her. "Is it all eaten away? Are there great holes in it everywhere?"

Miss Spider clambered back onto the deck with a pleased but also a rather puzzled look on her face. "You won't believe this," she said, "but actually there's hardly any damage down there at all! The peach is almost untouched! There are just a few tiny pieces out of it here and there, but nothing more."

"You must be mistaken," James told her.

"Of course she's mistaken!" the Centipede said.

"I promise you I'm not," Miss Spider answered.

"But there were hundreds of sharks around us!"

"They churned the water into a froth!"

"We saw their great mouths opening and shutting!"

"I don't care what you saw," Miss Spider answered. "They certainly didn't do much damage to the peach."

"Then why did we start sinking?" the Centipede asked.

"Perhaps we didn't start sinking," the Old-Green-Grasshopper suggested. "Perhaps we were all so frightened that we simply imagined it."

This, in point of fact, was closer to the truth than any of them knew. A shark, you see, has an extremely long sharp nose, and its mouth is set very awkwardly underneath its face and a long way back. This makes it more or less impossible for it to get its teeth into a vast smooth curving surface such as the side of a peach. Even if the creature turns onto its back it still can't do it, because the nose always gets in the way. If you have ever seen a small dog trying to get its teeth into an enormous ball, then you will be able to imagine roughly how it was with the sharks and the peach.

"It must have been some kind of magic," the Ladybug said. "The holes must have healed up by themselves."

"Oh, look! There's a ship below us!" shouted James. Everybody rushed to the side and peered over. None of them had ever seen a ship before.

"It looks like a big one."

"It's got three funnels."

"You can even see the people on the decks!"

"Let's wave to them. Do you think they can see us?"

Neither James nor any of the others knew it, but the ship that was now passing beneath them was actually the Queen Mary sailing out of the English Channel on her way to America. And on the bridge of the Queen Mary, the astonished Captain was standing with a group of his officers, all of them gaping at the great round ball hovering overhead.

"I don't like it," the Captain said.

"Nor do I," said the First Officer.

"Do you think it's following us?" said the Second Officer.

"I tell you I don't like it," muttered the Captain.

"It could be dangerous," the First Officer said.

"That's it!" cried the Captain. "It's a secret weapon! Holy cats! Send a message to the Queen at once! The country must be warned! And give me my telescope."

The First Officer handed the telescope to the Captain. The Captain put it to his eye.

"There's birds everywhere!" he cried. "The whole sky is teeming with birds! What in the world are they doing? And wait! Wait a second! There are people on it! I can see them moving! There's a - a - do I have this darned thing focused right? It looks like a little boy in short trousers! Yes, I can distinctly see a little boy in short trousers standing up there! And there's a - there's a - there's a - a - a - a sort of giant ladybugl"

"Now just a minute, Captain!" the First Officer said.

"And a colossal green grasshopper!"

"Captain!" the First Officer said sharply. "Captain, please!"

"And a mammoth spider!"

"Oh dear, he's been at the whisky again," whispered the Second Officer.

"And an enormous - a simply enormous centipede!" screamed the Captain.

"Call the Ship's Doctor," the First Officer said. "Our Captain is not well."

A moment later, the great round hall disappeared into a cloud, and the people on the ship never saw it again.

But up on the peach itself, everyone was still happy and excited.

"I wonder where we'll finish up this time," the Earthworm said.

"Who cares?" they answered. "Seagulls always go back to the land sooner or later."

Up and up they went, high above the highest clouds, the peach swaying gently from side to side as it floated along.

"Wouldn't this be a perfect time for a little music?" the Ladybug asked. "How about it, Old Grasshopper?"

"With pleasure, dear lady," the Old-Green-Grasshopper answered, bowing from the waist.

"Oh, hooray! He's going to play for us!" they cried, and immediately the whole company sat themselves down in a circle around the Old Green Musician - and the concert began.

From the moment that the first note was struck, the audience became completely spellbound. And as for James, never had he heard such beautiful music as this! In the garden at home on summer evenings, he had listened many times to the sound of grasshoppers chirping in the grass, and he had always liked the noise that they made. But this was a different kind of noise altogether. This was real music - chords, harmonies, tunes, and all the rest of it.

And what a wonderful instrument the Old-Green-Grasshopper was playing upon. It was like a violin! It was almost exactly as though he were playing upon a violin!

The bow of the violin, the part that moved, was his back leg. The strings of the violin, the part that made the sound, was the edge of his wing.

He was using only the top of his back leg (the thigh), and he was stroking this up and down against the edge of his wing with incredible skill, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, but always with the same easy flowing action. It was precisely the way a clever violinist would have used his bow; and the music came pouring out and filled the whole blue sky around them with magic melodies.

When the first part was finished, everyone clapped madly, and Miss Spider stood up and shouted, "Bravo! Encore! Give us some more!"

"Did you like that, James?" the Old-Green-Grasshopper asked, smiling at the small boy.

"Oh, I loved it!" James answered. "It was beautiful! It was as though you had a real violin in your hands!"

"A real violin!" the Old-Green-Grasshopper cried. "Good heavens, I like that! My dear boy, I am a real violin! It is a part of my own body!"

"But do all grasshoppers play their music on violins, the same way as you do?" James asked him.

"No," he answered, "not all. If you want to know, I happen to be a 'short-horned' grasshopper. I have two short feelers coming out of my head. Can you see them? There they are. They are quite short, aren't they? That's why they call me a 'short-horn'. And we 'short-horns' are the only ones who play our music in the violin style, using a bow. My 'long-horned' relatives, the ones who have long curvy feelers coming out of their heads, make their music simply by rubbing the edges of their two top wings together. They are not violinists, they are wing-rubbers. And a rather inferior noise these wing-rubbers produce, too, if I may say so. It sounds more like a banjo than a fiddle."

"How fascinating this all is!" cried James. "And to think that up until now I had never even wondered how a grasshopper made his sounds."

"My dear young fellow," the Old-Green-Grasshopper said gently, "there are a whole lot of things in this world of ours that you haven't started wondering about yet. Where, for example, do you think that I keep my ears?"

"Your ears? Why, in your head, of course." Everyone burst out laughing.

"You mean you don't even know that?" cried the Centipede.

"Try again," said the Old-Green-Grasshopper, smiling at James.