Eva Ibbotson - The Abominables

Nor did anyone ever find out who had freed the animals. True, Mr. Bullaby had babbled something about furry giants with bedsocks round their necks and Queen Victoria on their stomachs. But when people talk like that, there is only one thing to do: take them to some nice, quiet hospital and shut them up till they are better. And that is exactly what the people of Aslerfan did.

HE YELLOW LORRY HAD PASSED THROUGH THEbeautiful city of Istanbul and was almost in Greece before Con stopped shivering and peering into the rearview mirror to see if anyone was following them. Only when Perry went into a café in a little dusty village where they had stopped for petrol, and heard on the wireless that the Sultan of Aslerfan had fled, did the children relax.

Unfortunately, the news that they had saved the people of Aslerfan from their cruel sultan made the yetis very smug.

“We did good , didn’t we?” said Ambrose, his blue eye beaming. “We’re sort of rescuing yetis now.”

“Well, don’t be rescuing yetis again, please,” said Con, who’d really had a dreadful fright. “Not till you’re safe at Farley Towers.”

That night Perry found a beautiful deserted little bay on the Sea of Marmara with a track down which the lorry could just go. Lucy and Grandma paddled, lifting the long hair on their legs out of the water like Lady Agatha had shown them, and Ambrose tethered Hubert to a fig tree and told him that he was a big yak now and could eat grass perfectly well if he tried. Con made a bonfire and they sat round it while Perry told them just how he thought the Perrington Porker would look when he had bred it: pink and fat but very strong, with a double-jointed tail and droopy ears, because pigs with droopy ears are more peace-loving than the other kind.

“Can we play the Farley Towers game?” begged Ambrose, as they lay down under the stars to sleep. It was a game that Ellen had invented to while away the journey, and the yetis loved it.

“What will we do on our first day at Farley Towers?” said Lucy, because that was the way the game began.

“On the first day you’ll have dinner by candlelight with damask napkins,” said Ellen.

“What will we do on the second day?” said Ambrose.

“On the second day you’ll have tea on the lawn with strawberries and cream in crystal bowls,” said Ellen.

“’Ird?” said Clarence. “’Ird?”

But they never discovered what they would do on their third day at Farley Towers, because at that moment Hubert decided he had seen his mother.

Hubert had been seeing his mother ever since they’d left Nanvi Dar. In fact, when he wasn’t swallowing his teat or trying to dig Hubert Holes inside the lorry, seeing his mother was what Hubert did. But up to now his mother, though unlikely, had been possible : a stray goat, a distant, browsing sheep, that sort of thing. Whereas what Hubert was now straining to reach, bleating with delight, seemed to be a rusty heap of scrap metal somebody had left on the beach.

Sighing, the yetis got up again to look.

“No, dear,” said Grandma sternly, “that’s not your mother. That’s a wheelbarrow.”

And shaking their enormous heads, the yetis returned to their beds and fell asleep.

They traveled steadily north, through Greece with its ruined temples and its olive groves, through the long, flat plain of the Western Balkans with its storks and its fields of maize, until they came to the little country of Feldenberg, in the foothills of the Alps.

And now there were pine forests and clear, rushing rivers and the sound of cowbells from the meadows. The air grew cool; the trim, wooden houses had boulders on the roofs to weigh them down against the wind; and in the distance, white as icing sugar, were the glaciers of the Alpine peaks.

“Oh, isn’t it beautiful? It’s just like home!” cried the yetis when they were allowed to get out for a moment and have a stretch.

“Can I have some leather pants like that?” begged Ambrose, who had glimpsed, in a distant field, a little boy in lederhosen.

But Grandma had noticed something even more exciting. “What’s that noise?” she said eagerly, and Con explained that it was yodeling, a sort of cross between calling each other and singing, which people did on mountains.

“I can do that!” said Grandma. “I just know I can.” She threw back her head. “Yodel-aaa-eee-ooo,” yodeled Grandma. “Yodel-aaa-eee-ooo!”

“Oh, hush, Grandma,” begged the children, while all around there was the sound of ear lids thudding shut. “Suppose someone hears you!”

But it was no use. Yodeling is like a drug once it gets hold of you, and it had certainly got hold of Grandma. And it was with Grandma still going strong that they drove up toward the High Alps and the pass that ran between the towering crags of Death Peak to the east and the zigzag range of the Emperor Mountains to the west.

“It’s going to be quite a pull with this load on,” said Perry. “Cold at the top, too. I think we’ll stop off for a proper meal.”

So he parked the lorry by a deserted mill on the edge of a pretty village with an onion-domed church, a cobbled square, and an inn with carved wooden shutters and a white horse painted on a sign above the door. And when he explained to the yetis that the children ought to have something hot before the next part of the journey, they all promised to be as quiet as mice and keep the peephole tightly shut.

The inn had red-checked tablecloths, wooden benches, and nice, old-fashioned paintings on the walls showing brave St. Bernard dogs with barrels round their necks saving people from the snow. And while Con and Ellen waded through their huge helpings of liver soup with dumplings, pickled cabbage with ham, and nut cake with whipped cream, Perry, who spoke a little German, got talking to the innkeeper and his guests.

And what they were all talking about — very angrily — was a mad Englishman called Harry Letts.

Mr. Letts was a very rich and very important television tycoon who had come to spend his holiday in the village with his little son, a boy of nine, called Leo. Everybody liked Leo, who was a friendly, quiet, rather dreamy child, but nobody liked Mr. Letts, who had gone round telling anyone who would listen that his son was a spoiled, namby-pamby boy ruined by his mother and that he, Harold Letts, was going to make a man of him or else.

So that very morning he had set out with the little boy to climb Death Peak. And Death Peak, which towered above the village, was the highest, most dangerous mountain in Feldenberg.

“He is a criminal, a lunatic,” said the innkeeper angrily, wiping his counter clean. “Even an experienced person would not risk the peak today, with a storm coming up.”

“A storm?” said the children, surprised, when Perry told them what had been said. The sun shone; the icingsugar peaks stood out against a pale blue sky.

But when Perry and the children got back to the truck and shared the news, the yetis nodded their huge heads wisely. “Oh, yes, a storm’s coming. A bad one,” they said. “We can always tell because the hair on the back of our knees goes tingly.”

And sure enough, as the lorry ground its way slowly up the winding road, gradually leaving behind the lush meadows and fruit-hung orchards, the sun vanished behind clouds, the peaks turned mouse-colored and sinister, the wind freshened …