he would have been very surprised and rather hurt.
And if you’d told him that biting things with poisonous pincers was wrong or cruel, he would probably have told you not to be ridiculous. How else would he get anything to eat, or defend himself from creatures wanting to eat him?
Of course, you couldn’t have talked to Harry like that, even if you’d met him, because he couldn’t have understood you. Harry could only speak to other centipedes in Centipedish. In fact, his real name wasn’t Harry at all. It was (as nearly as I can write it) Hxzltl.
Hxzltl?
Yes. You see the problem at once. There are no vowel-sounds in Centipedish, just a sort of very faint crackling. What you could do is put in some vowel-sounds – some a’s, e’s, i’s, o’s and u’s – so that you can try to say his real name. Then you could call him Hixzalittle. Or Hoxzalottle. Or perhaps even Haxzaluttle. But still you wouldn’t be anywhere near the real sound of his name.
Which is why I call him Harry.
He lived in a very hot country – what we call the Tropics – with his mother.
Now, please don’t start asking what her name was. Oh no. Please. Oh… All right. Here goes. It was Bkvlbbchk. Bikvilababchuk? Bokvaliboobchak? Bakvolobibchawk? I don’t know. Why bother? We’ll never get it right. Let’s call her Belinda.
Belinda was also, of course, a poisonous centipede. A very large one – a good eight inches long, or twenty centimetres, if you want to be metric about it. Just imagine, eight inches of shiny, black, swift-moving centipede – a twenty-centi-centipede! Her body was something like a caterpillar’s, in segments, but covered with hard, shiny, dark stuff – a sort of suit of armour, which is called a cuticle.
Now, if you know a bit of Latin you’ll know that “centipede” means “one hundred feet”. Some kinds of centipede do have that many, but Harry’s kind didn’t. Harry and his mother had twenty-one segments with one pair of legs to each segment. Which makes forty-two legs. Each.
Quite a lot to keep track of, when you think about it, but neither Belinda nor Harry ever did think about it. Any more than you would think how difficult – Harry would have said, impossible – it is to move about on two legs. They just did it.
And did it, when they had to, very, very fast indeed.
Harry actually didn’t know just how fast he could run, until the Dreadful Time when, despite his mother’s sternest warning, he went Up the Up-Pipe. Which is the story I’m going to tell you.
When I get round to it. There are some other stories to tell first.
2. Belinda Tells a Scary Story
Harry, as I told you, lived in a hot country. But he didn’t know that for a long time because he didn’t live on the surface of the earth where the sun shone a lot. He lived in a mass of dark, cool tunnels under the ground.
He slept all through the day. But at night he would wake up and run along these lovely earthy tunnels, looking for things to eat. What things? Well, if you must know:
All kinds of insects and creepy-crawlies that were smaller than him.
He would chase after them, bite them, and, when the poison from his poisonclaws had paralysed them, crunch them up. Well, crunch if they were crunchy, like beetles, or munch if they were munchy, like worms.
Belinda, being much more than twice his size, could tackle big things like toads, small snakes, young mice and lizards. But then, she could go up to the surface to hunt. Only for a short time, though. Centipedes mustn’t get too dry or they can’t breathe, and it’s much easier to keep damp underground.
If she heard something thumping about on the surface that sounded good to eat, she’d nip along an up-going tunnel, scurry to the thumping thing, whatever it was, and if it wasn’t too big she would bite it with her poisonous pincers and drag it back down the tunnel to share it with Harry.
Belinda was a very good mother.
When Harry and her other babies first came out of their eggs, she’d make something like a little basket to keep them in, and tended them carefully until they were old enough to fend for themselves.
All her other many children had gone off and left her, as young centipedes usually do, but Harry stayed. He loved her and she loved him, calling him love-names like “best-in-my-nest” and “pride-of-my-basket”. She was always scared that something might happen to him, so she carefully warned him of any dangers.
Of course he didn’t take much notice. He was a big, strong, armoured centi (that’s a child centipede) with two fine poisonclaws, who could run faster than anything he’d ever met. What could hurt him?
“Lots of things,” Belinda said firmly. “There are many things bigger than you Hxzltl. When you’re grown up and go up to the big, open, no-top-world – and you must not do so before – you’ll find you’re not the biggest thing around, by any means – or even the fastest!”
And she told him about flying things that swooped down and grabbed you, and great legless belly-crawlers, bigger than the tunnels the centipedes lived in, and enormous hairy things with huge sharp teeth and hot breath that could run even faster that the fastest centipede.
But the most awful things of all, Belinda told him – the biggest and the most terrifyingly dangerous – were Hoo-Mins. (Of course she pronounced it H-Mns.)
“I’ve nearly been killed by a Hoo-Min,” his mother told him in a hushed tone. “Twice.”
“Mama!”
“Oh yes! Once when I couldn’t find food in the tunnels, I had to go up in the bright-time. All that bright light muddled me, and I got too far from the tunnel entrance. I was running back to it when a black shadow fell on me. Well, you don’t know about shadows because you’ve never been out when big-yellow-ball is shining, but it’s a dark thing that falls on you. And when you feel that shadow, you have to run like mad!”
“Why, is it heavy?”
“No. It doesn’t weigh anything, itself. But behind it there is always something. And this something, this time, was a huge heavy thing that came crashing down. It just missed me! I just ran out in time! And although I ran as fast as I could run, this huge heavy thing kept up with me, and came crashing down again and again!”
Harry shuddered. “What happened,