The Abominables, Page 2

  Even after Grandma came, Agatha’s family was not complete. A few years later, Father, who sometimes went exploring in the High Places, came back with a rather shy and nervous yeti a few years younger than himself.

  When he was young, Uncle Otto (as they called him) had had a Dreadful Experience. He was standing on a pinnacle of rock, admiring a most beautiful and uplifting sunrise, when two porters, carrying the baggage for a party of mountaineers, had come round the corner and seen him. Uncle Otto had smiled most politely, showing all his beautiful white teeth in welcome, but the porters had just screamed and gibbered and, throwing down their packs, rushed down the mountain so fast that one of them had fallen into a crevasse and been killed.

  After this, Uncle Otto had always felt shy and unwanted, and soon afterward a bald patch had appeared on his high, domed forehead. There is nothing like worry for making your hair fall out. But when Agatha taught him to speak, and to read, she was amazed at his intelligence. In the pocket of her father’s jacket, which she had slipped on before she was carried away, had been a copy of the Bible, and Uncle Otto used to spend hours sitting under his favorite rhododendron tree and reading. What’s more, he never skipped like the others did but even read the bits where Ahaz begat Jehoadah and Jehoadah begat Alameth. Not that he was conceited—far from it. It was the others who were so proud of him.

  And so the years passed peacefully and happily for Agatha and her yetis in the secret valley of Nanvi Dar. Because there was no smoke to get into her lungs, petrol fumes to give her headaches, or chemicals to mess up her food, Agatha grew old very, very slowly. Nearly a hundred years after she had come to the valley, she was still healthy and strong.

  But in the meantime the world outside was changing. More and more mountaineers came to climb the high peaks with newer and shinier tents and ropes and ice axes and stood about on the mountaintops being photographed and quarreling about who had got there first. And then one day Clarence said, “’Ook! ’Ook!” and when they looked up to where he was pointing, they saw, far away, a strange red bird in the sky—a helicopter—which quite amazed Lady Agatha, who’d left England when there weren’t even any motorcars.

  After that came the hotel.

  It was a huge luxury hotel—the Hotel Himalaya, they called it—built just across the border in the province of Bukhim, so that wealthy people who were too lazy to walk anywhere could sit in their rooms and watch the sun go down on the peaks of Nanvi Dar. The hotel meant new roads and planeloads of tourists. It meant litter on the snowy slopes and monasteries serving egg and chips and selling rubbishy souvenirs. It also meant new kinds of people: property developers and speculators, people who thought of the mountains not as beautiful places to be respected but as something that might make them rich.

  Lady Agatha wasn’t a worrier, but she began to worry now. It seemed to her only a matter of time before someone discovered the valley. And she knew enough about the cruel and terrible things that might happen to her yetis if the wrong people found them. They could be put in zoos behind bars with people poking them with umbrellas and throwing toffee wrappers into their cages. They could be put in a circus or a funfair and treated like freaks. Or—but this was so awful that Agatha began to shiver even as she thought of it—they could be hunted and killed for sport as the great mammals of Africa had been hunted and killed when man first set eyes on them.

  “Now listen, my dears,” she said to her yetis, gathering them around her. “I must ask you to stay safely hidden in the valley. No climbing in the High Places. No exploring.”

  “But I want to meet humans,” said Ambrose. “You’re a human. They could be our friends and tell us stories, like you do. And we could help them lift things.”

  Lady Agatha sighed. She blamed herself, of course, for not having been more honest about the world from which she came. But how could she explain about human wickedness to the yetis? They would simply never understand it. She could only hope that the yetis would obey her.

  And the yetis did. Ambrose, in any case, was busy taming his pet yak, an animal called Hubert. Yaks (which are a sort of small and very shaggy cow) are stubborn and hardy animals. But they are not very clever at the best of times. They don’t need to be, because all they do is eat grass at one end and give milk at the other. All the same, there had probably never before been a yak as stupid as Hubert.

  He was about the size of a folding pram, with a sad, boot-shaped face, a crumpled left horn, and knees that knocked together when he walked. Hubert knew he had a mother, but he was never quite sure which of the yaks was her, and when he did find her, he would suddenly get the idea that he was supposed to be back with Ambrose. Sometimes he would get so muddled that he would just bury his head in a hollow tree or a hole in the ground and give up; there were Hubert Holes like that all over the valley. Ambrose, however, wouldn’t hear a word against him, and as he said, Hubert was probably the only potholing yak in the world.

  But though all the yetis were as good and careful as could be, something dreadful did happen after all.

  In a way it was Lady Agatha’s fault for cooking such a lovely yak-milk pudding for their supper. Father and Uncle Otto had three helpings each; Grandma and Clarence and Ambrose had two. But Lucy said “May the Lord make us truly thankful” to the yak-milk pudding no less than five times. Nobody can have five helpings of pudding and sleep soundly. And that night, Lucy rose from the bed of leaves in which she slept beside her brothers, and with her blue eyes wide open and her arms stretched out in front of her, she walked—sightless and fast asleep—across the meadows, scaled apparently without effort the ferocious cliffs surrounding the valley, and stepped out onto the eternal snows.

  UCY GOT BACK SAFELY TO THE VALLEY—sleep-walkers usually seem to get back to their beds. But the glacier she had walked across had just had a new fall of snow. And right across it, from end to end, she left a row of footprints. Huge, clear, dachshund-sized prints: eight toes, rounded heels, and all. There is nothing like a portly yeti with flat feet for making marks that even a nitwit could identify.

  If only it had snowed, then things might have gone on as before. But it didn’t snow, not the next day or the next. And on the third day a couple of climbers came across the prints.

  Within a week, photographs of Lucy’s footprints were on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. All the old stories about Abominable Snowmen were dragged out again: how fierce they were, how huge … how they could swallow three goats at a gulp, how just to see one was to die within the week.

  The owners of the Hotel Himalaya, who knew all about how to make money, set to work at once. The day after the climbers had burst breathlessly into the hotel dining room with their news, people were sent out to find the footprints and preserve them, by roping them off, putting up signs, and covering them with tarpaulins in case it snowed. And a few days later full-page advertisements appeared in all the travel magazines and brochures, saying, Enjoy the Experience of a Lifetime! A week at the luxury Hotel Himalaya with guided Yeti Safari to the famous footprints! And underneath a picture of a hairy monster with fangs and blood dripping down its chin were the words Who will be the first to meet the Abominable Snowman face-to-face? IT COULD BE YOU!

  But it wasn’t a photographer or a journalist or a thrill-seeking tourist who found the secret valley of Nanvi Dar. It was a boy; quite a young one. And his name was Con.

  Con was a page boy at the Hotel Himalaya in Bukhim, opening doors and running errands for the guests. He was, perhaps, the smallest page boy in the world, and in Britain he would not have been allowed to work at all because he was far too young.

  When Con’s father, who ran a restaurant in London, had been offered the job of chef in the new hotel in Bukhim, he had tried to leave Con and his sister, Ellen, behind at nice boarding schools in England. But Con had dug in his heels. He was not, he said, going to spend his time rushing about on cricket pitches in silly white pants, or letting idiot boys hit him on the head with pillows in the dorm, when h
e could be living in one of the most exciting places in the world.

  “And anyway,” he’d said to his father, “I might see a yeti.”

  Con’s father didn’t believe in yetis, but he believed in Con. And when Con and Ellen both promised to work very hard at their lessons, he agreed to take them along.

  And the children kept their promise and worked very hard indeed. Even so, because they didn’t have to stand about in Assembly having headmasters make speeches to them, hang around in drafty schoolyards waiting for whistles to blow, or fight for their school dinners, they had lots of spare time. So in the afternoons Con put on a red uniform with silver buttons and helped to look after the visitors, and Ellen, who was very domestic and liked to be busy, worked with the maids. The children’s mother had been killed in a car crash two years earlier, and it helped Ellen to do the things she’d done with her.

  When Con had told his father that he might see a yeti, he hadn’t been joking. Ever since he’d first read about yetis, he’d had a special feeling about them. When people had scoffed and said there weren’t any such things, Con had simply shrugged. He just knew there were and that one day he would see one.

  So when Lucy’s footsteps had first been seen on the slopes of Nanvi Dar, Con had been incredibly happy and excited. He longed to join the groups of visitors on the trek up to the glacier. For the Yeti Safari was a huge success. People arrived at the Hotel Himalaya from all over the world. But soon Con stopped being happy and began to feel quite sick. The hotel manager did everything he could to cash in on the yetis, selling yeti pajamas and yeti scarves and yeti postcards that made them look like dim-witted baboons. And finally, when Con had spent some time helping groups of tourists get ready for their trek, running backward and forward with Thermoses they had left in their rooms, tying their bootlaces, polishing their snow goggles, pulling on their padded mittens, and smearing suncream on their noses, he stopped feeling sick and began to be frightened.

  In one of the tour groups there were a couple of beetroot-faced army officers drinking rum out of silver hip flasks who talked about “getting a potshot at the brutes, eh?” In another there was a very thin woman wearing boots that Con was absolutely sure were made from the skin of the terribly rare snow leopard. She kept laughing like a hyena and telling her husband that she “must have a yeti-skin coat, daah-ling.” When a third group departed that included a fat little man who seemed to think a yeti was a kind of elephant, because he did nothing except wonder how much one could get for a pair of tusks, Con had had enough.

  That night he couldn’t get to sleep. He was just too horribly angry. He knew what would happen if one of those rich, bored, stupid people really did stumble across a yeti. Nobody who cared deeply about those mysterious creatures could even afford to buy a cup of tea in the Hotel Himalaya, let alone go on the ridiculously expensive Yeti Safari. So it was only a question of time.

  “I wish they had never found those footprints,” Con said to himself. And then he knew what he had to do.

  He woke an hour before dawn, dressed quickly in the warmest things he had, and began carefully and methodically to pack his rucksack. He had been out hiking many times and knew what he would need. But he also knew that he was planning something very dangerous, and probably very foolish. He left a note for Ellen and his father. Then he slipped out of the hotel.

  The route up to the glacier was not hard to follow. It had been well trampled the last few weeks, and there were fixed ropes at the more difficult places; it was certainly no harder for Con than for the little fat man. He reckoned on making better time than the tour groups, because they moved very slowly, with frequent stops for tea and tidbits. And in the early afternoon they stopped at a specially prepared campsite with fires blazing and servants rushing about with hot meals and drinks. Even so, Con was expecting to spend at least one night well above the tree line at a dangerously high altitude.

  By midafternoon, exhausted and breathing with difficulty in the thin air, Con was standing on the glacier in the shadow of the huge, towering rock face that made up the eastern shoulder of Nanvi Dar. It was easy to find the footprints. Already hundreds of tourists had shuffled around them. But now the fun was over. When Con was finished, the mountains and their secret inhabitants could find peace again.

  He had to hurry. If he did not get off the glacier and find shelter before nightfall, then he would die, no doubt about it. All he needed to do was remove the protective covering and let the snow clouds that were gathering in the west do the rest. He pulled the heavy tarpaulins aside and then, to be absolutely sure, he started kicking snow into the prints, tramping in them, so that they were completely obliterated. He followed the prints, kicking and stamping, all the way to where the snow of the glacier ended and the footprints (if you followed them the right way, letting the heels lead you) stopped. Over this great cliff of rock the yeti must have clambered, but a human being could not hope to follow. No less than three mountaineering expeditions, with the newest equipment, had tried to conquer the eastern ramparts of Nanvi Dar and failed.

  Afterward, Grandma said it was the will of God, because why should Con have come to the sheer rock face just at that moment? The moment when there burst out of the space between two boulders at the base of the cliff a most extraordinary THING.

  A sort of molehill it seemed to be. But were molehills hairy? And did they bleat?

  Completely puzzled, Con scrambled up to have a closer look.

  The THING was a head. The small, earth-covered head of a very worried baby yak.

  Hubert had had a dreadful day. First he’d gone up to someone who he was absolutely certain was his mother, but she hadn’t been, and had been rude about it. Then he’d trotted back to find Ambrose, but Ambrose was helping Lady Agatha pick bamboo shoots and he wasn’t there. By this time Hubert was so muddled that he’d gone and buried his head in a hole, meaning to wait till things got clearer inside his head. But the hole hadn’t been like his usual holes. It had gone on and on and on. And now he had come out in this strange place and his back end was stuck in the mountain and it was all very difficult and very hopeless and very sad.

  “Don’t worry, little boot face,” said Con, patting the yak on the nose. “I’ll soon get you clear.”

  He took hold of Hubert’s shoulders and began tugging and pulling—carefully but with all his strength. For a while nothing happened except that Hubert’s bleats got more and more frantic. Then suddenly there was a popping noise, and in a shower of small stones, Hubert’s backside came out of the mountain and fell across Con’s feet.

  “A tunnel?” said Con, peering across Hubert into the deep, black hole from which the yak had come. “It can’t be!”

  But it was: a narrow channel through the side of the mountain that had once been the bed of an underground river.

  “You must have come from the other side,” said Con wonderingly. “And if I lie down, I’m smaller than you are …”

  He dropped onto his hands and knees and began to edge his way into the tunnel. The sunshine turned to gray twilight, then to darkness: pitch-darkness as Hubert, terrified of being left alone, turned back and followed him.

  It was a fearful journey and agonizingly slow. Water trickled down the sides of the tunnel, jagged daggers of ice hung from the roof; Con had never been so cold. Often he wanted to stop and go back, but behind him, blocking off all retreat—puffing, dribbling, butting with his crumpled horn—came Hubert.

  “I … can’t do it,” gasped Con. The passage was getting narrower now. It was like being in an endless, ice-cold grave. “I can’t …”

  And then he saw it. A narrow chink of light. Golden light. Sunlight.

  The chink grew bigger. It had grass in it; flowers; the flash of water … and something else …

  “No,” breathed Con. “I don’t believe it.”

  But it was true. On a tussock of grass sat a little old lady wearing a long white flannel nightdress. Beside her, his armchair-sized head within reach of her han
d, lay an enormous chocolate-colored creature whose left ear she was gently scratching. Another huge beast—with a dreamy look and the largest stomach Con had ever seen—was sitting nearby, peacefully combing out her elbows. Three more of them were paddling in the stream or picking flowers and one—his bald patch gleaming in the sunlight—was leaning against a tree and reading a book.

  “Tell it again,” came the voice of the chocolate-colored yeti. “Tell where the Ugly Sisters tried to cut off their toes to get their feet in the glass slipper.”

  “That’s enough for today.” The old lady’s voice was firm. The creature lifted his head and began reluctantly to get up. Then he let out a great yell.

  “Look, Lady Agatha! Look, everybody! It’s a funny sort of human dwarf thing. And it’s come out of Hubert’s hole!”

  N HOUR LATER, AS THE SHADOWS LENGTHENED and the sun began to set behind the western escarpments of the secret valley, Con was sitting on a grassy bank beside the stream, drinking the warm yak’s milk that Lady Agatha had heated for him on a charcoal fire.

  “So it’s the crater of an extinct volcano?”

  “Well, so I believe,” said Lady Agatha. “There are some marvelous hot springs over there. I don’t know what I would have done without hot water when the children were small. And the soil is wonderfully fertile, even better than Hampshire. But are you sure,” Lady Agatha broke off to ask, “that your father won’t be worried about you?”