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called Daisy Entwistle was standing so close to it as it passed that she had the skin taken off the tip of her long nose.
    Would it ever stop?
    Why should it? A round object will always keep on rolling as long as it is on a downhill slope, and in this case the land sloped downhill all the way until it reached the ocean – the same ocean that James had begged his aunts to be allowed to visit the day before.
    Well, perhaps he was going to visit it now. The peach was rushing closer and closer to it every second, and closer also to the towering white cliffs that came first.
    These cliffs are the most famous in the whole of England, and they are hundreds of feet high. Below them, the sea is deep and cold and hungry. Many ships have been swallowed up and lost for ever on this part of the coast, and all the men who were in them as well. The peach was now only a hundred yards away from the cliff – now fifty – now twenty – now ten – now five – and when it reached the edge of the cliff it seemed to leap up into the sky and hang there suspended for a few seconds, still turning over and over in the air.
    Then it began to fall…
    Down…

    Down…
    Down…
    Down…
    Down…
    SMACK!
It hit the water with a colossal splash and sank like a stone.
    But a few seconds later, up it came again, and this time, up it stayed, floating serenely upon the surface of the water.

Seventeen
    At this moment, the scene inside the peach itself was one of indescribable chaos. James Henry Trotter was lying bruised and battered on the floor of the room amongst a tangled mass of Centipede and Earthworm and Spider and Ladybird and Glowworm and Old-Green-Grasshopper. In the whole history of the world, no travellers had ever had a more terrible journey than these unfortunate creatures. It had started out well, with much laughing and shouting, and for the first few seconds, as the peach had begun to roll slowly forward, nobody had minded being tumbled about a little bit. And when it went
BUMP !
, and the Centipede had shouted, ‘
That
was Aunt Sponge!’ and then
BUMP!
again, and ‘
That
was Aunt Spiker!’ there had been a tremendous burst of cheering all round.
    But as soon as the peach rolled out of the gardenand began to go down the steep hill, rushing and plunging and bounding madly downward, then the whole thing became a nightmare. James found himself being flung up against the ceiling, then back on to the floor, then sideways against the wall, then up on to the ceiling again, and up and down and back and forth and round and round, and at the same time all the other creatures were flying through the air in every direction, and so were the chairs and the sofa, not to mention the forty-two boots belonging to the Centipede. Everything and all of them were being rattled around like peas inside an enormous rattle that was being rattled by a mad giant who refused to stop. To make it worse, something went wrong with the Glow-worm’s lighting system, and the room was in pitchy darkness. There were screams and yells and curses and cries of pain, and everything kept going round and round, and once James made a frantic grab at some thick bars sticking out from the wall only to find that they were a couple of the Centipede’s legs. ‘Let go, you idiot!’ shouted the Centipede, kicking himself free, and James was promptly flung across the room into the Old-Green-Grasshopper’s horny lap. Twice he got tangled up in Miss Spider’s legs (a horrid business), and towards the end, the poor Earthworm, who was cracking himself like a whip every time he flew through the air from one side of the room to the other, coiled himself around James’s body in a panic and refused to unwind.
    Oh, it was a frantic and terrible trip!

    But it was all over now, and the room was suddenly very still and quiet. Everybody was beginning slowly and painfully to disentangle himself from everybody else.
    ‘Let’s have some light!’ shouted the Centipede.
    ‘Yes!’ they cried.