فصل 32

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.’