James and the Giant Peach Read online

  Once they passed a snow machine in operation, with the Cloud-Men turning the handle and a blizzard of snowflakes 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 tornadoes were manufactured and sent spinning down towards 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 travellers heard a soft whooshing noise above their heads and they glanced up and saw an immense grey batlike creature swooping down towards them out of the dark. It circled round and round the peach, flapping its great wings slowly in the moonlight and staring at the travellers. 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.

  Thirty-two

  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 Ladybird. '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 Ladybird.

  '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.'

  Thirty-three

  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 centre 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 programmes 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 pyjamas, 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.

  Thirty-four

  '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!'

  'Yes, this is perfect! Don't bite any more, Centipede, or we'll sink too fast! Gently does it!'

  Slowly the great peach began losing height, and the buildings and streets down below began coming closer and closer.

  'Do you think we'll all get our pictures in the papers when we get down?' the Ladybird asked.

  'My goodness, I've forgotten to polish my boots!' the Centipede said. 'Everyone must help me to polish my boots before we arrive.'

  'Oh, for heaven's sake!' said the Earthworm. 'Can't you ever stop thinking about -'

  But he never finished his sentence. For suddenly... WHOOOSH!... and they looked up and saw a huge four-engined plane come shooting out of a near-by cloud and go whizzing past them not more than twenty feet over their heads. This was actually the regular early morning passenger plane coming in to New York from Chicago, and as it went by, it sliced right through every single one of the silken strings, and immediately the seagulls broke away, and the enormous peach, having nothing to hold it up in the air any longer, went tumbling down towards the earth like a lump of lead.

  'Help!' cried the Centipede.

  'Save us!' cried Miss Spider.

  'We are lost!' cried the Ladybird.

  'This is the end!' cried the Old-Green-Grasshopper.

  'James!' cried the Earthworm. 'Do something, James! Quickly, do something!'

  'I can't!' cried James. 'I'm sorry! Good-bye! Shut your eyes everybody! It won't be long now!'

  Thirty-five

  Round and round and upside down went the peach as it plummeted towards the earth, and they were all clinging desperately to the stem to save themselves from being flung into space.

  Faster and faster it fell. Down and down and down, racing closer and closer to the houses and streets below, where it would surely smash into a million pieces when it hit. And all the way along Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, and along all the other streets in the City, people who had not yet reached the underground shelters looked up and saw it coming, and they stopped running and stood there staring in a sort of stupor at what they thought was the biggest bomb in all the world falling out of the sky on to their heads. A few women screamed. Others knelt down on the sidewalks and began praying aloud. Strong men turned to one another and said things like, 'I guess this is it, Joe,' and 'Good-bye, everybody, good-bye.' And for the next thirty seconds the whole City held its breath, wait