Roald Dahl - James and the Giant Peach

"I am drowned!" gasped the Old-Green-Grasshopper, spitting out water by the pint.

"It's gone right through my skin!" the Earthworm groaned. "I always thought my skin was waterproof but it isn't and now I'm full of rain!"

"Look at me, look at me!" shouted the Centipede excitedly. "It's washed me clean! The paint's all gone! I can move again!"

"That's the worst news I've had in a long time," the Earthworm said.

The Centipede was dancing around the deck and turning somersaults in the air and singing at the top of his voice:

"Oh, hooray for the storm and the rain!

I can move! I don't feel any pain!

And now I'm a pest, I'm the biggest and best,

The most marvelous pest once again!"

"Oh, do shut up," the Old-Green-Grasshopper said.

"Look at me!" cried the Centipede.

"Look at ME! Iam freed! I am freed!

Not a scratch nor a bruise nor a bleed!

To his grave this fine gent

They all thought they had sent

And I very near went!

Oh, I VERY near went!

But they cent quite the wrong Sentipede!"

"How fast we are going all of a sudden," the Ladybug said. "I wonder why?"

"I don't think the seagulls like this place any better than we do," James answered. "I imagine they want to get out of it as soon as they can. They got a bad fright in that storm we've just been through."

Faster and faster flew the seagulls, skimming across the sky at a tremendous pace, with the peach trailing out behind them. Cloud after cloud went by on either side, all of them ghostly white in the moonlight, and several more times during the night the travelers caught glimpses of Cloud-Men moving around on the tops of these clouds, working their sinister magic upon the world below.

Once they passed a snow machine in operation, with the Cloud-Men turning the handle and a blizzard of snow-flakes blowing out of the great funnel above. They saw the huge drums that were used for making thunder, and the Cloud-Men beating them furiously with long hammers. They saw the frost factories and the wind producers and the places where cyclones and tornados were manufactured and sent spinning down toward the Earth, and once, deep in the hollow of a large billowy cloud, they spotted something that could only have been a Cloud-Men's city. There were caves everywhere running into the cloud, and at the entrances to the caves the Cloud-Men's wives were crouching over little stoves with frying-pans in their hands, frying snowballs for their husbands' suppers. And hundreds of Cloud-Men's children were frisking about all over the place and shrieking with laughter and sliding down the billows of the cloud on toboggans.

An hour later, just before dawn, the travelers heard a soft whooshing noise above their heads and they glanced up and saw an immense gray batlike creature swooping down toward them out of the dark. It circled round and round the peach, flapping its great wings slowly in the moonlight and staring at the travelers. Then it uttered a series of long deep melancholy cries and flew off again into the night.

"Oh, I do wish the morning would come!" Miss Spider said, shivering all over.

"It won't be long now," James answered. "Look, it's getting lighter over there already."

They all sat in silence watching the sun as it came up slowly over the rim of the horizon for a new day.

And when full daylight came at last, they all got to their feet and stretched their poor cramped bodies, and then the Centipede, who always seemed to see things first, shouted, "Look! There's land below!"

"He's right!" they cried, running to the edge of the peach and peering over. "Hooray! Hooray!"

"It looks like streets and houses!"

"But how enormous it all is!"

A vast city, glistening in the early morning sunshine, lay spread out three thousand feet below them. At that height, the cars were like little beetles crawling along the streets, and people walking on the pavements looked no larger than tiny grains of soot.

"But what tremendous tall buildings!" exclaimed the Ladybug. "I've never seen anything like them before in England. Which town do you think it is?"

"This couldn't possibly be England," said the Old-Green-Grasshopper.

"Then where is it?" asked Miss Spider.

"You know what those buildings are?" shouted James, jumping up and down with excitement. "Those are skyscrapers! So this must be America! And that, my friends, means that we have crossed the Atlantic Ocean overnight!"

"You don't mean it!" they cried. "It's not possible!"

"It's incredible! It's unbelievable!"

"Oh, I've always dreamed of going to America!" cried the Centipede. "I had a friend once who -"

"Be quiet!" said the Earthworm. "Who cares about your friend? The thing we've got to think about now is how on earth are we going to get down to earth?"

"Ask James," said the Ladybug.

"I don't think that should be so very difficult," James told them. "All we'll have to do is to cut loose a few seagulls. Not too many, mind you, but just enough so that the others can't quite keep us up in the air. Then down we shall go, slowly and gently, until we reach the ground. Centipede will bite through the strings for us one at a time."

Far below them, in the City of New York, something like pandemonium was breaking out. A great round ball as big as a house had been sighted hovering high up in the sky over the very center of Manhattan, and the cry had gone up that it was an enormous bomb sent over by another country to blow the whole city to smithereens. Air-raid sirens began wailing in every section. All radio and television programs were interrupted with announcements that the population must go down into their cellars immediately. One million people walking in the streets on their way to work looked up into the sky and saw the monster hovering above them, and started running for the nearest subway entrance to take cover. Generals grabbed hold of telephones and shouted orders to everyone they could think of. The Mayor of New York called up the President of the United States down in Washington, D.C. to ask him for help, and the President, who at that moment was having breakfast in his pajamas, quickly pushed away his half-finished plate of Sugar Crisps and started pressing buttons right and left to summon his Admirals and his Generals. And all the way across the vast stretch of America, in all the fifty States from Alaska to Florida, from Pennsylvania to Hawaii, the alarm was sounded and the word went out that the biggest bomb in the history of the world was hovering over New York City, and that at any moment it might go off.

"Come on, Centipede, bite through the first string," James ordered.

The Centipede took one of the silk strings between his teeth and bit through it. And once again (but not with an angry Cloud-Man dangling from the end of the string this time) a single seagull came away from the rest of the flock and went flying off on its own.

"Bite another," James ordered. The Centipede bit through another string.

"Why aren't we sinking?"

"We are sinking!"

"No, we're not!"

"Don't forget the peach is a lot lighter now than when we started out," James told them. "It lost an awful lot of juice when all those hailstones hit it in the night. Cut away two more seagulls, Centipede!"

"Ah, that's better!"

"Here we go!"

"Now we really are sinking!"