They ran blindly, without thinking.
Lots of others were running too – other centipedes, and hundreds of other underground creatures – ants and beetles and bugs, and bigger things too. Things the centis would normally hunt, or be hunted by. Now none of them were thinking about eating each other. They were just fleeing from the smoke that was drifting down the tunnels from the surface.
It was coming from a bonfire that a Hoo-Min had lit, to burn the leaves. But what do centipedes know about bonfires?
They only knew they were choking and terrified.
They ran. Their many swift legs carried them fast and far along the tunnels. They kept together. They ran instinctively along down-sloping tunnels because these were freer from smoke.
That was how they found themselves in the water-cave under the Up-Pipe.
There they stopped. They were too tired to run any more. The smoke in their breathing holes made them weak. But down here there wasn’t any smoke. At least, not yet.
“Maybe we’ll be safe here,” said Belinda.
Safe? Safe, under the Up-Pipe?
“Mama, we’re not safe here!” said Harry. “The Hoo-Mins send water down the Up-Pipe to Get us! Last time we were here, we nearly—”
Belinda turned round slowly and looked at Harry.
“The last time you were here?” she said. “The last time you were here? How many times have you been here, since I told you NEVER NEVER NEVER to come here?”
“Two times,” said Harry at last, hanging his little round head.
Belinda sank to the ground.
“You might as well have left when my other centis did,” she said sadly. “You don’t love me. You don’t listen to me. You don’t care what I say. I might as well not be your mother.”
Harry threw himself on top of her.
“Mama! That’s not true! Of course I love you, of course I care! It was just…”
But he couldn’t think what it was “just”. He couldn’t remember now why he had disobeyed his mother.
George said bravely, “It was my fault. I talked him into it,” but Belinda hardly heard him.
She just kept lying there, shaking her head sorrowfully and saying, “You came to this worst-place-in-the-world. You didn’t believe me. I was trying to keep you safe.”
Harry kept touching her gently with his front feelers, trying to tell her how sorry he was.
“Please, Mama,” he said at last, “let’s get out of here. It’s dangerous, honestly! The white-choke stuff is safer than this! At least it doesn’t drown you!”
But even as he crackled, some of the white-choke came creeping down the tunnels after them. It began to fill the water-cave.
(In case you’re interested, the Hoo-Min on the surface had been pumping smoke down a hole to kill snakes and other things, and it was spreading right through the network of tunnels. But the centipedes didn’t know that.)
Belinda jumped up on to her forty-two feet.
“We can’t go back up that tunnel!” she said. “Let’s run alongside the water-channel – maybe there are other tunnels at the other end!”
But even as she crackled, they felt that smoke was coming stealing towards them from the far darkness at the other end of the cave!
It was coming thicker and thicker, spreading itself all around them. It had even reached the bottom of the Up-Pipe and was beginning to creep upward!