Читать книгу Harry the Poisonous Centipede - Lynne Reid Banks - Страница 11
ОглавлениеHe woke slowly. He felt awful. Truly awful.
The world was all wrong, somehow.
Harry’s eyes weren’t good anyway and now they were useless. They seemed to be staring straight into the earth. Something hard was pressing on the back of his head. His legs weren’t touching anything. He kicked them about, trying to run, but it was no use. He thrust out his poison-claws, which was always his reaction to danger. They closed on emptiness.
He slowly realised how he was. He was upside down, a position he’d never been in before. That was why he felt so funny.
He didn’t realise how lucky he’d been. He’d been washed to the side of the pool, or stream, or whatever it was, on to his back. Because of this, all the water that had got into his breathing holes had drained out. Of course he still couldn’t breathe very well because some of the holes were now blocked by the ground.
He struggled to right himself, rocking this way and that, wriggling and twisting.
With a final jerk, he managed to get his front half round the right way. After that, it wasn’t hard to turn the rest of himself.
He looked around. The pool wasn’t there any more. Just a long muddy channel. It seemed that the water flowed down it, like the rainwater in Harry’s regular tunnels, and then soaked away, somehow.
Harry tested his twenty-one segments by lifting them one by one off the ground, and all his forty-two feet by moving them in the air, in a sort of ripple, first along one side of him, then along the other. They seemed to work. What a relief!
He tried to run. He found he could! He did. He ran as fast as he could run in the direction of home. (He knew by instinct which direction to run in.)
As he ran, he tried to think. Should he tell his mother what had happened to him?
Probably better not. Even though he hadn’t done the one thing she’d told him never to do – go Up the Up-Pipe into the Place of the Hoo-Mins.
