James and the Giant Peach pdfdrive com

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.’

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