The sun was bleeding into the sky like a branching-out river stream. The horizon was orangey yellow with a slight tinge of red, filled with tranquillity. Peter was contently drifting along a cliff where he saw a mermaid on a rock basking in the warm sun. Wendy and her brothers caught sight of Peter. Just then, they saw Peter pouncing on the mermaid. As he did, the mermaid tumbled straight down to the sea and Peter shot down like a torpedo after her. Wendy and her brothers’ eyes popped out with fright. They raced across the cliff and plunged into the sea where Peter and the mermaid disappeared.
The sea water was as warm as a hot tub. The floating force was pushing all the swimming fish upwards and the children too! It took them a long time to move a few metres down until they discovered a current leading downwards. Along the way, they were amazed by the picturesque scenery of the glimmering coral reef; a big patch of coral was in the shape of a hairy mammoth which had dozens of bumps like sleeping babies by its side. Schools of fish were swimming about freely, in and out of the reef. The entire place was lit by the shimmering sun.
Nearly crashing into a stone statue, Wendy and her brothers realised an ancient city with giant crumbling stone buildings. On the statue, they noticed an engraving -- Atlantic City. It was the ruin of The Lost City of Atlantis. The place was an eerie ghost city which was abandoned thousands of years ago. They saw Peter trapped in a particularly dark cave inside an air bubble ball with spikes on the wall. When he tried punching through the ball, the spikes pierced his skin and drops of blood came dribbling down.
The same mermaid Peter pushed off the cliff was charging around him, raging with ruddy face; electricity was buzzing around her black scales on her tail. An anglerfish glowing bulb was hanging off from her forehead waving and squirming along with her fearful, electric-eel hair. When she glared at Peter with her gleaming, saucer-like eyes, she yelled straight into his face, “You are going to pay for pushing me off the CLIFF! You shall live in this prison for YEARS!”
“No, once I get out of this prison, you shall be the one trapped in the bubble!” snapped Peter. Their quarrels made the fish in one-thousand mile radius dashed away. Peter was boldly floating there, hands on hips and legs wide open; that made the mermaid steaming. She hurled her trident at Peter but pierced the bubble instead. Peter took this opportunity to shoot up into the sky like a rocket.
She screamed, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!”
Wendy and her brothers were in a hide-out. She asked her brothers, “Where do you think Peter is?”
“ I don’t know where he is, but we need to find him,” stammered John. They all chased after Peter. Peter landed onto a cliff. Tugging Peter by his shirt, they landed behind Peter in the next split second.
“How do you find me!!” exclaimed Peter.
“We saw the fight between you and the mermaid and now we follow you up here,” smiled Wendy bouncing up and down.
Peter boasted in a weird yet handsome voice, “You saw nothing.”
The FLIGHT is taken from Peter Pan by Peter Berrie
"Second to the right, and straight on till morning."
That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions. Peter, you see, just said anything that came into his head.
At first his companions trusted him implicitly, and so great were the delights of flying that they wasted time circling round church spires or any other tall objects on the way that took their fancy.
John and Michael raced, Michael getting a start.
They recalled with contempt that not so long ago they had thought themselves fine fellows for being able to fly round a room.
Not long ago. But how long ago? They were flying over the sea before this thought began to disturb Wendy seriously. John thought it was their second sea and their third night.
Certainly they did not pretend to be sleepy, they were sleepy; and that was a danger, for the moment they popped off, down they fell. The awful thing was that Peter thought this funny.
"There he goes again!" he would cry gleefully, as Michael suddenly dropped like a stone.
Save him, save him!" cried Wendy, looking with horror at the cruel sea far below. Eventually Peter would dive through the air, and catch Michael just before he could strike the sea, and it was lovely the way he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life. Also he was fond of variety, and the sport that engrossed him one moment would suddenly cease to engage him, so there was always the possibility that the next time you fell he would let you go.
He could sleep in the air without falling, by merely lying on his back and floating, but this was, partly at least, because he was so light that if you got behind him and blew he went faster.
"Do be more polite to him," Wendy whispered to John, when they were playing Follow My Leader.
"Then tell him to stop showing off," said John.
When playing Follow My Leader, Peter would fly close to the water and touch each shark's tail in passing, just as in the street you may run your finger along an iron railing. They could not follow him in this with much success, so perhaps it was rather like showing off, especially as he kept looking behind to see how many tails they missed.
"You must be nice to him," Wendy impressed on her brothers. "What could we do if he were to leave us!"
"We could go back," Michael said.
"How could we ever find our way back without him?"
"Well, then, we could go on," said John.
"That is the awful thing, John. We should have to go on, for we don't knowhow to stop."
This was true, Peter had forgotten to show them how to stop.
John said that if the worst came to the worst, all they had to do was to go straight on, for the world was round, and so in time they must come back to their own window.
"And who is to get food for us, John?"
"I nipped a bit out of that eagle's mouth pretty neatly, Wendy."
"After the twentieth try," Wendy reminded him. "And even though we became good at picking up food, see how we bump against clouds and things if he is not near to give us a hand."
Peter was not with them for the moment, and they felt rather lonely up there by themselves. He could go so much faster than they that he would suddenly shoot out of sight, to have some adventure in which they had no share. He would come down laughing over something fearfully funny he had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was, or he would come up with mermaid scales still sticking to him, and yet not be able to say for certain what had been happening. It was really rather irritating to children who had never seen a mermaid.
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