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.
6
Aslerfan
The 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 night-time, 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 and find a place in which 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 travelling. 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 life. But when they had said sorry to the last of their condensed milk tins and lay down under the stars to sleep, Con and Ellen always took it in 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 is the most exhausting thing in the world and that he needed his sleep.
And in this way they travelled 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, blonde 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 grey faces; half-starved mongrel dogs dodged in and out of the 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 mouth 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 aeroplanes 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 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 its inside was more like that of an ailing old lady than a twenty-tonne truck. Its carburettor 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.
“Oh, Lord!” said Perry. “Not the water pump.”
But it was. “We’ll have to spend the night here, I’m afraid, while I get this thing fixed,” said Perry worriedly. “I’ll find as quiet a place to park as I can but for goodness’ sake don’t let the yetis out. You saw that bear…”
So he parked in a quiet street not far from the Sultan’s palace. Beside it was a little park, with a few dusty date palms, a tobacco kiosk and a public lavatory. And at the far side, something else. A zoo.
The yetis had never before had to spend a night in a town, let alone a town like Aslerfan. It meant that they couldn’t get out and say, “Sorry, grass,” and build a campfire and stretch their legs, but had to stay cooped up in the lorry, which was stiflingly hot because Perry had disabled the refrigeration system to get at the water pump. But the yetis understood that it was necessary and they were very good.
While Perry went to find a garage and Con went shopping for some fruit, Ellen slipped into the little park to buy some lemonade for the yetis from a kiosk. When she came back, she was very quiet and pale.
“Are you sad?” said Ambrose, and his brown eye got ready in case there was any crying to be done.
But Ellen just shook her head and said it was nothing, or perhaps the heat. And then Con returned and they had a picnic in the back and they were just getting ready for the bedtime story when the noises began.
They were bad noises: howls of misery; roars of loneliness; whimpers of pain.
Even by the light of his torch, Con could see the yetis’ ear lids turn pale and Lucy, who had just taken her seventh banana, put it down untouched.
“That was a poor lion who’s got no meat to say ‘sorry’ to,” she said, as an ear-splitting roar filled the night.
“That elephant has got a pain in his trunk,” said Uncle Otto worriedly.