James and the Giant Peach

'They are sharks!' cried the Earthworm. 'I'll bet you anything you like that they are sharks and they have come along to eat us up!'

'What absolute rot!' the Centipede said, but his voice seemed suddenly to have become a little shaky, and he wasn't laughing.

'I am positive they are sharks!' said the Earthworm. 'I just know they are sharks!'

And so, in actual fact, did everybody else, but they were too frightened to admit it.

There was a short silence. They all peered down anxiously at the sharks who were cruising slowly round and round the peach.

'Just assuming that they are sharks,' the Centipede said, 'there still can't possibly be any danger if we stay up here.'

But even as he spoke, one of those thin black fins suddenly changed direction and came cutting swiftly through the water right up to the side of the peach itself. The shark paused and stared up at the company with small evil eyes.

'Go away!' they shouted. 'Go away, you filthy beast!' Slowly, almost lazily, the shark opened his mouth (which was big enough to have swallowed a perambulator) and made a lunge at the peach. They all watched, aghast.

And now, as though at a signal from the leader, all the other sharks came swimming in toward the peach, and they clustered around it and began to attack it furiously. There must have been twenty or thirty of them at least, all pushing and fighting and lashing their tails and churning the water into a froth.

Panic and pandemonium broke out immediately on top of the peach.

'Oh, we are finished now!' cried Miss Spider, wringing her feet. 'They will eat up the whole peach and then there'll be nothing left for us to stand on and they'll start on us!'

'She is right!' shouted the Ladybug. 'We are lost forever!'

'Oh, I don't want to be eaten!' wailed the Earthworm. 'But they will take me first of all because I am so fat and juicy and I have no bones!'

'Is there nothing we can do?' asked the Ladybug, appealing to James. 'Surely you can think of a way out of this.'

Suddenly they were all looking at James.

'Think!' begged Miss Spider. 'Think, James, think!'

'Come on,' said the Centipede. 'Come on, James. There must be something we can do.'

Their eyes waited upon him, tense, anxious, pathetically hopeful.

20

'There is something that I believe we might try,' James Henry Trotter said slowly. 'I'm not saying it'll work…'

'Tell us!' cried the Earthworm. 'Tell us quick!'

'We'll try anything you say!' said the Centipede. 'But hurry, hurry, hurry!'

'Be quiet and let the boy speak!' said the Ladybug. 'Go on, James.'

They all moved a little closer to him. There was a longish pause.

'Go on!' they cried frantically. 'Go on!'

And all the time while they were waiting they could hear the sharks threshing around in the water below them. It was enough to make anyone frantic.

'Come on, James,' the Ladybug said, coaxing him.

'I… I… I'm afraid it's no good after all,' James murmured, shaking his head. 'I'm terribly sorry. I forgot. We don't have any string. We'd need hundreds of yards of string to make this work.'

'What sort of string?' asked the Old-Green-Grasshopper sharply.

'Any sort, just so long as it's strong.'

'But my dear boy, that's exactly what we do have! We've got all you want!'

'How? Where?'

'The Silkworm!' cried the Old-Green-Grasshopper. 'Didn't you ever notice the Silkworm? He's still downstairs! He never moves! He just lies there sleeping all day long, but we can easily wake him up and make him spin!'

'And what about me, may I ask?' said Miss Spider. 'I can spin just as well as any Silkworm. What's more, I can spin patterns.'

'Can you make enough between you?' asked James.

'As much as you want.'

'And quickly?'

'Of course! Of course!'

'And would it be strong?'

'The strongest there is! It's as thick as your finger! But why? What are you going to do?'

'I'm going to lift this peach clear out of the water!' James announced firmly.

'You're mad!' cried the Earthworm.

'It's our only chance.'

'The boy's crazy!' 'He's joking!'

'Go on, James,' the Ladybug said gently. 'How are you going to do it?'

'Skyhooks, I suppose,' jeered the Centipede.

'Seagulls,' James answered calmly. 'The place is full of them. Look up there!'

They all looked up and saw a great mass of seagulls wheeling round and round in the sky.

'I'm going to take a long silk string,' James went on, 'and I'm going to loop one end of it around a seagull's neck. And then I'm going to tie the other end to the stem of the peach.' He pointed to the peach stem, which was standing up like a short thick mast in the middle of the deck.

'Then I'm going to get another seagull and do the same thing again, then another and another -'

'Ridiculous!' they shouted.

'Absurd!'

'Poppycock!'

'Balderdash!'

'Madness!'

And the Old-Green-Grasshopper said, 'How can a few seagulls lift an enormous thing like this up into the air, and all of us as well? It would take hundreds… thousands…'

'There is no shortage of seagulls,' James answered. 'Look for yourself. We'll probably need four hundred, five hundred, six hundred… maybe even a thousand… I don't know… I shall simply go on hooking them up to the stem until we have enough to lift us. They'll be bound to lift us in the end. It's like balloons. You give someone enough balloons to hold, I mean really enough, then up he goes. And a seagull has far more lifting power than a balloon. If only we have the time to do it. If only we are not sunk first by those awful sharks…'

'You're absolutely off your head!' said the Earthworm. 'How on earth do you propose to get a loop of string around a seagull's neck? I suppose you're going to fly up there yourself and catch it!'

'The boy's dotty!' said the Centipede.

'Let him finish,' said the Ladybug. 'Go on, James. How would you do it?'

'With bait.'

'Bait! What sort of bait?'

'With a worm, of course. Seagulls love worms, didn't you know that? And luckily for us, we have here the biggest, fattest, pinkest, juiciest Earthworm in the world.'

'You can stop right there!' the Earthworm said sharply. 'That's quite enough!'

'Go on,' the others said, beginning to grow interested. 'Go on!'