James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl Page A

that happened was extremly unfortunate. The ropes that the Cloud-Men had been using for lowering the rainbow got tangled up with the silk strings that went up from the peach to the seagulls! The peach was trapped! Panic and pandemonium broke out among the travellers, and James Henry Trotter, glancing up quickly, saw the faces of a thousand furious Cloud-Men peering down at him over the edge of the cloud. The faces had almost no shape at all because of the long white hairs that covered them. There were no noses, no mouths, no ears, no chins – only the eyes were visible in each face, two small black eyes glinting malevolently through the hairs.
    Then came the most frightening thing of all. One Cloud-Man, a huge hairy creature who must have been fourteen feet tall at least, suddenly stood up and made a tremendous leap off the side of the cloud, trying to get to one of the silk strings above the peach. James and his friends saw him go flying through the air above them, his arms outstretched in front of him, reaching for the nearest string, and they saw him grab it and cling to it with his hands and legs. And then, very very slowly, hand over hand, he began to come down the string.
    ‘Mercy! Help! Save us!’ cried the Ladybird.
    ‘He’s coming down to eat us!’ wailed the Old-Green-Grasshopper. ‘Jump overboard!’
    ‘Then eat the Earthworm first!’ shouted the Centipede.‘It’s no good eating me, I‘m full of bones like a kipper!’

    ‘Centipede!’ yelled James. ‘Quickly! Bite through that string, the one he’s coming down on!’
    The Centipede rushed over to the stem of the peach and took the silk string in his teeth and bit through it with one snap of his jaws. Immediately, far above them, a single seagull was seen to come away from the rest of the flock and go flying off with a long string trailing from its neck. And clinging desperately to the end of the string, shoutingand cursing with fury, was the huge hairy Cloud-Man. Up and up he went, swinging across the moonlit sky, and James Henry Trotter, watching him with delight, said, ‘My goodness, he must weigh almost nothing at all for one seagull to be able to pull him up like that! He must be all hair and air!’
    The rest of the Cloud-Men were so flabbergasted at seeing one of their company carried away in this manner that they let go the ropes they were holding and then of course down went the rainbow, both halves of it together, tumbling towards the earth below. This freed the peach, which at once began sailing away from that terrible cloud.
    But the travellers were not in the clear yet. The infuriated Cloud-Men jumped up and ran after them along the cloud, pelting them mercilessly with all sorts of hard and horrible objects. Empty paint buckets, paint brushes, stepladders, stools, saucepans, frying-pans, rotten eggs, dead rats, bottles of hair-oil – anything those brutes could lay their hands on came raining down upon the peach. One Cloud-Man, taking very careful aim, tipped a gallon of thick purple paint over the edge of the cloud right on to the Centipede himself.
    The Centipede screamed with anger. ‘My legs!’ he cried. ‘They are all sticking together! I can’t walk! And my eyelids won’t open! I can’t see! And my boots! My boots are ruined!’
    But for the moment everyone was far too busy dodging the things that the Cloud-Men were throwing to pay any attention to the Centipede.
    ‘The paint is drying!’ he moaned. ‘It’s going hard! I can’t move my legs! I can’t move anything!’
    ‘You can still move your mouth,’ the Earthworm said. ‘And that is a great pity.’
    ‘James!’ bawled the Centipede. ‘Please help me! Wash off this paint! Scrape it off! Anything!’

Twenty-nine
    It seemed like a long time before the seagulls were able to pull the peach away from that horrible rainbow-cloud. But they managed it at last, and then everybody gathered around the wretched Centipede and began arguing about the best way to get the