The Abominables

Chapter 2 The Trouble With Yetis

S SOON AS SHE SAW THE ORPHANED YETIS, Agatha gave up all idea of escaping from the secret valley. No, she would stay and bring the babies up to be God-fearing creatures and give them a mother’s love. For she realized at once that the big yeti who had kidnapped her must be a widower who had lost his wife in some tragic accident and that he wanted her to care for his children.

And care for them she did. The very fat, blue-eyed baby was a girl and Agatha called her Lucy, after the kennel-maid who had been her best friend at Farley Towers. The brown-eyed yeti, who was a boy, she called Clarence. And of course there was Ambrose, with his mad eyes and his squashed face — Ambrose who was always being sat on by the others, or falling into mouse-hare holes, or getting lost.

The first thing Agatha did, naturally, was teach all the yetis to talk. Father learned to speak quite quickly even though he was over three hundred years old by the time Agatha came to the valley, and it is not so easy to learn things as you get older. And of course the children learned as easily as they breathed.

After that, Agatha taught them all the things that her governess had taught her, like the importance of good manners: not burping after meals, not scratching under the armpits however much one itched, and never closing one’s ear lids when being spoken to. She taught them how to clean between their teeth with a sharpened stick and how to wash their eight-toed, backward-pointing feet in the stream after they’d been running, because smelly feet are not polite. She taught them sums and their alphabet and how to sing hymns. Best of all, she used to tell them stories. Soon after she arrived in the valley, Father had realized that a well-bred English girl needed somewhere to call home, and he had gathered stones and built her a little house, no more than a hut really, roofing it with branches and grass. In the evenings, Agatha would sit outside with the yetis around her. “Once upon a time …” she would begin.

The yetis were mad about stories. “Puss in Boots,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “The Three Bears”—all day they followed her about, begging for more. As for Ambrose, long before dawn Agatha could hear him sitting and breathing outside the entrance to her hut (by the time he was two years old he was much too big to get through it), waiting and waiting to hear about Ali Baba, or poor Cinderella, or Dick Whittington’s cat.

At first Lady Agatha was surprised by how easily the yetis took to a civilized English upbringing, but she soon realized that they were truly kind and considerate by nature, not only to each other, but to every living thing. In the mornings, when she combed them, they would cup their huge hands to catch the little spiders and beetles that had crept into their hair during the night, and release them carefully onto the ground. They always looked where they were putting their huge feet, avoiding worm casts and spiders’ nests and molehills, in case someone was at home. So they were particularly pleased when Agatha taught them to say sorry, for you should Always Apologize for Any Inconvenience You Have Caused.

But when they began to apologize to everything they ate (and yetis eat a lot), saying, “Sorry, mango,” “Sorry, flower,” “Sorry, yak-milk pancake,” Lady Agatha thought that this was going too far — Moderation in All Things — and taught them to say grace. “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.” It was not a great improvement. They did say grace politely when they sat down to a meal together. But yetis graze quite a lot, on grass or fruit or young tree shoots, and they went on apologizing as they wandered about, so that there was an almost constant murmuring in the hidden valley, rather like a swarm of contented bees. Agatha tried to persuade them that saying sorry to every nut and berry was not the English Way, but although she was a remarkably good governess, in this she failed. The yetis continued to apologize to every blade of grass.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that they were perfect. Perfect yetis, like perfect people, would have been dull. Lucy’s little problem was food. She really loved eating. All day one could hear Lucy wandering up and down the valley saying, “Sorry,” before she cropped a mouthful of grass or, “Sorry, tree,” before she chewed up a branch. The result of this, of course, was that she became very fat, and the hair on her stomach looked as though it were growing on an enormous kettledrum. And because her stomach was always full, Lucy slept badly. Or rather she slept all right but she walked in her sleep. When you heard a terrible crash or a fearful rumbling noise in the mountains of Nanvi Dar, it wasn’t necessarily a rockfall or an avalanche. It was just as likely to be Lucy falling over a tree stump as she blundered with unseeing eyes out of her bed.

Clarence had a problem, too. With him it was his brain. When he was small, Clarence had been naughty and left the valley without telling Lady Agatha and gone climbing on his own, and a gigantic boulder had come loose and hit him on the head. After that, Clarence’s brain did not work too well, so that while he was as strong as the others and could pick a fir tree as easily as a daisy, he was really not very bright and could only say one word at a time and it was usually wrong.

As for Ambrose, he started life as a little mewling thing, all eyes and feet and not much in between, and Agatha had some very worrying moments, sitting up with him when he was teething or running a temperature. Once, when he had had a runny nose for a full month, she said, half joking, “Ambrose, you really are an abominable snowman.” The name stuck and he was Ambrose the Abominable from then on. Because of all the trouble he had caused her as a baby, and the times when she seriously thought he might not survive, he had a special place in Agatha’s heart. This sometimes happens to mothers, however hard they try to love all their children absolutely equally. But at last the worst was over, and Ambrose grew fast, and he grew strong. When he was nineteen, before he lost his milk teeth, he pushed over the biggest pine tree in the valley looking for wood lice to play with, and he would cheerfully lift boulders the size of telephone boxes to help Lucy make a playhouse. If anyone had happened to catch sight of Ambrose, with his walleye and enormous strength, their knees would have started to tremble and sweat would have broken out on their brow. He really did look like people imagined yetis to be — abominable. In actual fact, however, he was the soppiest yeti ever, forever making daisy chains for Lady Agatha, or lying beside her asking if there were fairies in the stars, or begging for another story. He always gave things away — food to Lucy, pretty stones to Clarence — and sometimes Lady Agatha thought it might be a good thing if he really was a tiny little bit abominable. She would never have called him wet, exactly, or soft (he never complained when he hurt himself), but was he just a little bit too kind for his own good?

When Agatha had been in the valley about thirty years and Ambrose, Clarence, and Lucy were already children rather than babies, a very old and stringy female yeti tottered into the valley from a range of mountains to the east. They called her Grandma, and just sometimes after she had taught her to speak, Agatha wished she hadn’t, because all Grandma did was grumble. She grumbled about her rheumatism, she grumbled about her teeth. She grumbled about her share of juniper berries at lunchtime and about how careless Ambrose was, bouncing on her corns. But the yetis knew one had to be kind and gentle to the old, and they behaved beautifully toward Grandma. The only thing they wouldn’t do, even for Lady Agatha, was keep their ear lids open when she sang. And really, you couldn’t blame them. Grandma singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as she milked the yaks didn’t just sound like a road drill. It sounded like a road drill with tonsillitis.

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.