Eva Ibbotson - The Abominables

“When we wake up, shall we really be at Farley Towers?” asked Ambrose.

“Really,” said Con. “All you have to do is hibernate and leave it to us.”

“Only of course we can’t hibernate just like that ,” said Ambrose craftily, putting his head on one side and gazing at Ellen. “You’ll have to tell us a cold story. The coldest story ever .”

So while Con turned the freezer to “maximum,” Ellen told them about the Snow Queen in her palace of glittering ice, and about little Kay, whom she carried away in her sledge and kept a prisoner, and the yetis thought it was very beautiful and very sad and just about as cold as you could expect a story to be.

And the yetis were just getting very limp and drowsy, and Ellen had just kissed them all good night, when from the patch of darkness outside the garage door there came a trembly, bleating sound — a sound that turned Con’s heart to stone.

“What is it, Con?” asked Ellen.

But there was no need for anybody to tell her. Tottering into the headlights of the lorry, his idiot head waving from side to side, his left horn even more crumpled than it had been in Nanvi Dar, came Hubert.

In a second, Ambrose, his drowsiness forgotten, tumbled from the rack and leaped out of the lorry.

“It’s my yak! It’s my pet! It’s Hubert! It was him I heard on the mountain. Oh, Hubert, you’ll be able to come to England with us!”

“No!” The words burst from Con. “I can’t do it! You’ve got to tell him to go home.”

The other yetis had followed Ambrose out of the lorry. Now they looked rather pityingly at Con. “We could say ‘Go home,’” explained Uncle Otto. “We could say ‘Go home’ three or four hundred times. But you may perhaps have noticed that Hubert is not a very clever yak.”

Con said bitterly that it had crossed his mind. “But we can’t take him. Ellen, you’ll have to get the maids to look after him.”

Ellen gave him a worried look. “Con, it’s going to take them three days to get the bridal suite cleaned up. And you know what a state Dad’s in about us going. I just don’t think he’ll wear a yak.”

“Oh, please, please , can’t he come? He loves us so much,” said Ambrose, and his brown eye started up again.

“Don’t you see?” said Con. “Yaks don’t hibernate. At the other end you’d find him frozen solid. Dead .”

There was a pause while the yetis took this in, and Hubert tried two steps, skidded on a patch of oil, and fell flat on his face.

“Couldn’t we stay awake? Not be refrigerated?” asked Ambrose.

“Actually, I’ve a fancy to see a bit of the countryside myself,” said Grandma. “Seems a shame to go all that way asleep.”

Con bit his lip, thinking hard. Yetis peacefully hibernating were one thing. Yetis awake, needing food, needing exercise, were quite another. There was real danger there.

Hubert gave another plaintive bleat and tottered forward.

“Oh, all right, get the wretched animal in,” said Con, making up his mind.

And while Ellen ran back for some powdered milk and a feeding bottle, Con turned off the freezer and slammed the door. Then Perry came from the hotel kitchens carrying a crate of beer and his guitar, and, with a last hug for Mr. Bellamy, they got into the cab of the lorry, and the long, long journey to Farley Towers began.

HE YELLOW LORRY DROVE ON, DAY AFTER DAY,down through the foothills of the Himalayas, across the burning plains of India and Pakistan, across Afghanistan with its stony mountains and wild goats and poplar trees, and through the deserts of Iran, where the sand got into the yetis’ nostrils and between their toes and into their food …

It was not an easy journey. The yetis had to be sealed up inside the lorry until nighttime, when they found a deserted place to stop and they could come out and stretch their legs and get some air. The lorry was bumpy, and every so often Clarence said, “’Ick, ’ick,” and then Perry would have to quickly try to find a place where a yeti could be sick without anybody seeing, which was not so easy at all. And of course Hubert, who had to be fed from a bottle every four hours and then turned upside down because he’d swallowed the teat, was just as much of a nuisance as Con had foreseen.

But after a while, the yetis got a taste for traveling. Sitting round the campfire at the end of the day, listening to Perry strum his guitar and pushing Hubert’s hooves out of the butter, they felt that this really was the life. But when the yetis had said sorry to the last of their condensed milk tins and lay down under the stars to sleep, Con and Ellen always took turns to stay awake so that no one should come on the yetis unexpectedly. Nor would they ever let Perry take his turn, however much he grumbled, because they knew that driving a lorry for great distances was the most exhausting thing in the world and that he needed his sleep.

And in this way they traveled very happily until they came to the city of Aslerfan, the capital of the state of Aslerfan, which is wedged like a slice of melon between Iran and Turkey.

Although the yetis couldn’t see out, they began to feel queer almost as soon as they crossed the border. Grandma said her corns were shooting and she didn’t like the way her liver was carrying on. Lucy kept nervously twisting Queen Victoria and her nine children in her long blond fingers; Uncle Otto’s face was set and stern.

“I don’t like this place. It feels funny,” said Ambrose the Abominable.

Con and Ellen, sitting in the cab in front, liked it even less. They were approaching the city now.

There were beggars everywhere; the people had gray faces; half-starved mongrel dogs dodged in and out of traffic. It was dusty and hot, and suddenly Ellen drew in her breath because an old man had just crossed the road leading a poor mangy, limping bear on a chain so tight that he looked as though he must choke.

“It’s a dancing bear,” Perry explained, while Con made sure that the peephole to the back was tightly shut. “On the way to the palace, I expect. They jab them and put hot coals in their mouths and make them dance for money. Aslerfan’s the only place left in the world where you’re allowed to do that.”

And he explained to the children that Aslerfan was ruled by a cruel and greedy sultan, who lived in luxury in his palace with a fleet of cars and airplanes and yachts. The Sultan Midul had five hundred embroidered shirts and twelve hundred pairs of trousers and three fat wives covered from top to toe in diamonds, but his people lived in poverty and squalor. Instead of building schools and hospitals, the Sultan had huge feasts in which everybody gorged themselves till they were sick and then began again. Instead of looking after the old and the needy, he organized great hunts in which hundreds of beautiful gazelles and antelopes were cruelly slaughtered. Everybody hated him, but nobody dared to protest because they would just have been put in jail or shot.

“All I ever want to do in Aslerfan,” said Perry, “is get through it as quickly as possible.”

But Perry reckoned without the lorry.

Perry’s lorry looked all right from the outside, but inside it was more like an ailing old lady than a forty-ton truck. Its carburetor got choked up as soon as you breathed on it, its exhaust pipe hung on by willpower and string, and the engine sounded like an old hen with the croup. And now, just when they wanted to get through Aslerfan quickly, the wretched lorry began to boil.