The passengers on the peach (all except the Centipede) sat frozen with terror, looking back at the Cloud-Men and wondering what was going to happen next.
'Now you've done it, you loathsome pest!' whispered the Earthworm to the Centipede.
'I'm not frightened of them!' shouted the Centipede, and to show everybody once again that he wasn't, he stood up to his full height and started dancing about and making insulting signs at the Cloud-Men with all forty-two of his legs.
This evidently infuriated the Cloud-Men beyond belief. All at once, they spun round and grabbed great handfuls of hailstones and rushed to the edge of the cloud and started throwing them at the peach, shrieking with fury all the time.
'Look out!' cried James. 'Quick! Lie down! Lie flat on the deck!'
It was lucky they did! A large hailstone can hurt you as much as a rock or a lump of lead if it is thrown hard enough - and my goodness, how those Cloud-Men could throw! The hailstones came whizzing through the air like bullets from a machine-gun, and James could hear them smashing against the sides of the peach and burying themselves in the peach flesh with horrible squelching noises - plop! plop! plop! plop! And then ping! ping! ping! as they bounced off the poor Ladybird's shell because she couldn't lie as flat as the others. And then crack! as one of them hit the Centipede right on the nose and crack! again as another one hit him somewhere else.
'Ow!' he cried. 'Ow! Stop! Stop! Stop!'
But the Cloud-Men had no intention of stopping. James could see them rushing about on the cloud like a lot of huge hairy ghosts, picking up hailstones from the pile, dashing to the edge of the cloud, hurling the hailstones at the peach, dashing back again to get more, and then, when the pile of stones was all gone, they simply grabbed handfuls of cloud and made as many more as they wanted, and much bigger ones now, some of them as large as cannon balls.
'Quickly!' cried James. 'Down the tunnel or we'll all be wiped out!'
There was a rush for the tunnel entrance, and half a minute later everybody was safely downstairs inside the stone of the peach, trembling with fright and listening to the noise of the hailstones as they came crashing against the side of the peach.
'I'm a wreck!' groaned the Centipede. 'I am wounded all over!'
'It serves you right,' said the Earthworm.
'Would somebody kindly look and see if my shell is cracked?' the Ladybird said.
'Give us some light!' shouted the Old-Green-Grasshopper.
'I can't!' wailed the Glow-worm. 'They've broken my bulb!'
'Then put in another one!' the Centipede said.
'Be quiet a moment,' said James. 'Listen! I do believe they're not hitting us any more!'
They all stopped talking and listened. Yes - the noise had ceased. The hailstones were no longer smashing against the peach.
'We've left them behind!'
'The seagulls must have pulled us away out of danger.
'Hooray! Let's go up and see!'
Cautiously, with James going first, they all climbed back up the tunnel. James poked his head out and looked around. 'It's all clear!' he called. 'I can't see them anywhere!'
Twenty-eight
One by one, the travellers came out again on to the top of the peach and gazed carefully around. The moon was still shining as brightly as ever, and there were still plenty of huge shimmering cloud-mountains on all sides. But there were no Cloud-Men in sight now.
'The peach is leaking!' shouted the Old-Green-Grasshopper, peering over the side. 'It's full of holes and the juice is dripping out everywhere!'
'That does it!' cried the Earthworm. 'If the peach is leaking then we shall surely sink!'
'Don't be an ass!' the Centipede told him. 'We're not in the water now!'
'Oh, look!' shouted the Ladybird. 'Look, look, look! Over there!'
Everybody swung round to look.
In the distance and directly ahead of them, they now saw a most extraordinary sight. It was a kind of arch, a colossal curvy-shaped thing that reached high up into the sky and came down again at both ends. The ends were resting upon a huge flat cloud that was as big as a desert.
'Now what in the world is that?' asked James.
'It's a bridge!'
'It's an enormous hoop cut in half!'
'It's a giant horseshoe standing upside down!'
'Stop me if I'm wrong,' murmured the Centipede, going white in the face, 'but might those not be Cloud-Men climbing all over it?'
There was a dreadful silence. The peach floated closer and closer.
'They are Cloud-Men!'
'There are hundreds of them!'
'Thousands!'
'Millions!'
'I don't want to hear about it!' shrieked the poor blind Earthworm. 'I'd rather be on the end of a fish hook and used as bait than come up against those terrible creatures again!'
'I'd rather be fried alive and eaten by a Mexican!' wailed the Old-Green-Grasshopper.
'Please keep quiet,' whispered James. 'It's our only hope.'
They crouched very still on top of the peach, staring at the Cloud-Men. The whole surface of the cloud was literally swarming with them, and there were hundreds more up above climbing about on that monstrous crazy arch.
'But what is that thing?' whispered the Ladybird. 'And what are they doing to it?'
'I don't care what they're doing to it!' the Centipede said, scuttling over to the tunnel entrance. 'I'm not staying up here! Good-bye!'
But the rest of them were too frightened or too hypnotized by the whole affair to make a move.
'Do you know what?' James whispered.
'What?' they said. 'What?'
'That enormous arch - they seem to be painting it! They've got pots of paint and big brushes! You look!'
And he was quite right. The travellers were close enough now to see that this was exactly what the Cloud-Men were doing. They all had huge brushes in their hands and they were splashing the paint on to the great curvy arch in a frenzy of speed, so fast, in fact, that in a few minutes the whole of the arch became covered with the most glorious colours - reds, blues, greens, yellows, and purples.
'It's a rainbow!' everyone said at once. 'They are making a rainbow!'
'Oh, isn't it beautiful!'
'Just look at those colours!'
'Centipede!' they shouted. 'You must come up and see this!' They were so enthralled by the beauty and brilliance of the rainbow that they forgot to keep their voices low any longer. The Centipede poked his head cautiously out of the tunnel entrance.
'Well, well, well,' he said. 'I've always wondered how those things were made. But why all the ropes? What are they doing with those ropes?'
'Good heavens, they are pushing it off the cloud!' cried James. 'There it goes! They are lowering it down to the earth with ropes!'
'And I'll tell you something else,' the Centipede said sharply. 'If I'm not greatly mistaken, we ourselves are going to bump right into it!'
'Bless my soul, he's right!' the Old-Green-Grasshopper exclaimed.
The rainbow was now dangling in the air below the cloud. The peach was also just below the level of the cloud, and it was heading directly towards the rainbow, travelling rather fast.
'We are lost!' Miss Spider cried, wringing her feet again. 'The end has come!'
'I can't stand it!' wailed the Earthworm. 'Tell me what's happening!'
'We're going to miss it!' shouted the Ladybird.
'No, we're not!'
'Yes, we are!'
'Yes! - Yes! - No! - Oh, my heavens!'
'Hold on, everybody!' James called out, and suddenly there was a tremendous thud as the peach went crashing into the top of the rainbow. This was followed by an awful splintering noise as the enormous rainbow snapped right across the middle and became two separate pieces.
The next thing 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, shouting and 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 paint off his body.
He really did look a sight. He was purple all over, and now that the paint was beginning to dry and harden, he was forced to sit very stiff and upright, as though he were encased in cement. And all forty-two of his legs were sticking out straight in front of him, like rods. He tried to say something, but his lips wouldn't move. All he could do now was to make gurgling noises in his throat.
The Old-Green-Grasshopper reached out and touched him carefully on the stomach. 'But how could it possibly have dried so quickly?' he asked.
'It's rainbow-paint,' James answered. 'Rainbow-paint dries very quick and very hard.'
'I detest paint,' Miss Spider announced. 'It frightens me. It reminds me of Aunt Spiker - the late Aunt Spiker, I mean - because the last time she painted her kitchen ceiling my poor darling grandmother stepped into it by mistake when it was still wet, and there she stuck. And all through the night we could hear her calling to us, saying "Help! help! help!" and it was heartbreaking to listen to her. But what could we do? Not a thing until the next day when the paint had dried, and then of course we all rushed over to her and calmed her down and gave her some food. Believe it or not, she lived for six months like that, upside down on the ceiling with her legs stuck permanently in the paint. She really did. We fed her every day. We brought her fresh flies straight from the web. But then on the twenty-sixth of April last, Aunt Sponge - the late Aunt Sponge, I mean - happened to glance up at the ceiling, and she spotted her. "A spider!" she cried. "A disgusting spider! Quick! Fetch me the mop with the long handle!" And then - Oh, it was so awful I can't bear to think of it...' Miss Spider wiped away a tear and looked sadly at the Centipede. 'You poor thing,' she murmured. 'I do feel sorry for you.'
'It'll never come off,' the Earthworm said brightly. 'Our Centipede will never move again. He will turn into a statue and we shall be able to put him in the middle of the lawn with a bird-bath on the top of his head.'
'We could try peeling him like a banana,' the Old-Green-Grasshopper suggested.
'Or rubbing him with sandpaper,' the Ladybird said.
'Now if he stuck out his tongue,' the Earthworm said, smiling a little for perhaps the first time in his life, 'if he stuck it out really far, then we could all catch hold of it and start pulling. And if we pulled hard enough, we could turn him inside out and he would have a new skin!'
There was a pause while the others considered this interesting proposal.
'I think,' James said slowly, 'I think that the best thing to do...' Then he stopped. 'What was that?' he asked quickly. 'I heard a voice! I heard someone shouting!'
Thirty
They all raised their heads, listening.
'Ssshh! There it is again!'
But the voice was too far away for them to hear what it was saying.
'It's a Cloud-Man!' Miss Spider cried. 'I just know it's a Cloud-Man! They're after us again!'
'It came from above!' the Earthworm said, and automatically everybody looked upward, everybody except the Centipede, who couldn't move.
'Ouch!' they said. 'Help! Mercy! We're going to catch it this time!' For what they now saw, swirling and twisting directly over their heads, was an immense black cloud, a terrible, dangerous, thundery-looking thing that began to rumble and roar even as they were staring at it. And then, from high up on the top of the cloud, the faraway voice came down to them once again, this time very loud and clear.
'On with the faucets!' it shouted. 'On with the faucets! On with the faucets!'
Three seconds later, the whole underneath of the cloud seemed to split and burst open like a paper bag, and then - out came the water! They saw it coming. It was quite easy to see because it wasn't just raindrops. It wasn't raindrops at all. It was a great solid mass of water that might have been a lake or a whole ocean dropping out of the sky on top of them, and down it came, down and down and down, crashing first on to the seagulls and then on to the peach itself, while the poor travellers shrieked with fear and groped around frantically for something to catch hold of - the peach stem, the silk strings, anything they could find - and all the time the water came pouring and roaring down upon them, bouncing and smashing and sloshing and slashing and swashing and swirling and surging and whirling and gurgling and gushing and rushing and rushing, and it was like being pinned down underneath the biggest waterfall in the world and not being able to get out. They couldn't speak. They couldn't see. They couldn't breathe. And James Henry Trotter, holding on madly t
o one of the silk strings above the peach stem, told himself that this must surely be the end of everything at last. But then, just as suddenly as it had started, the deluge stopped. They were out of it and it was all over. The wonderful seagulls had flown right through it and had come out safely on the other side. Once again the giant peach was sailing peacefully through the mysterious moonlit sky.
'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 marvellous pest once again!'
'Oh, do shut up,' the Old-Green-Grasshopper said.
'Look at me!' cried the Centipede.
'Look at ME! I am 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!'
Thirty-one
'How fast we are going all of a sudden,' the Ladybird 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 travellers caught glimpses of Cloud-Men moving around on the tops of these clouds, working their sinister magic upon the world below.