“Don’t worry, little Bootface,” 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 which 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 on to his hands and knees and began to edge his way into the tunnel. The sunshine turned to grey 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 rock, 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 hand, lay an enormous chocolate-coloured 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-coloured yeti. “Tell where the Ugly Sisters tried to cut off their toes to get them 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!”
4
A Plan
An hour later, as the shadows lengthened and the sun began to set behind the eastern 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 marvellous 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, “that your father won’t be worried about you?”
“Well, I did leave a note,” said Con, “so he won’t be too worried until tomorrow evening. Anyway,” he went on contentedly, “I can’t leave tonight, can I?”
All around him sat the yetis, as close to him as they could get, but trying very hard not to stare because they knew it was rude.
“I don’t mind him having no hair on his face,” whispered Ambrose to his sister. “I just know we are going to be friends.”
“He’s very thin,” murmured Lucy worriedly. “Shall I go and say sorry to some grass for him?”
“Now run along, all of you,” said Lady Agatha, when Con had finished drinking. “I want to talk to this boy alone before bedtime.”
“But he hasn’t told me a story,” wailed Ambrose. “He knows a new one, about a chicken called Donald!”
“Not a chicken, Ambrose,” said Con. “A duck.”
“Later, dear,” said Lady Agatha, and Ambrose ambled off after the others to investigate Hubert’s hole, which had turned out to be a tunnel to the world outside.
When they had gone, Lady Agatha looked at Con’s serious, thoughtful face, and sighed.
“If you’d been grown up,” she said, “not still a child, I’d have thought you’d been sent in answer to my prayers.”
Con was sitting on the grass at her feet, his hands round his knees.
“Why?” he said.
For a moment she didn’t answer. Then she said: “For some time now, I have thought that my yetis ought to leave the valley. That they ought to be taken to a place where they will be absolutely safe. I am an extremely old woman, you see. How old you might not believe. And if anyone found them here in the wilds after my death… well, anything could happen.”
Con was silent. He knew only too well how right she was. Those dreadful people in the hotel…
“Father would always be safe,” Lady Agatha went on. “He knows every rock, every crevasse; he’s wise and he can be cunning. But the children… they’re so trusting. And Grandma is old, and Uncle Otto… well, he’s a scholar and they’re never very good at looking after themselves.”
“But where would they go, Lady Agatha? Where would you take them?”
A dreamy look came into her face. “To my old home. To Farley Towers, in Hampshire.”
“All the way to Britain!” Con was amazed. It was a journey half across the world, through the burning plains of India, the stony wastes of Afghanistan, across Iran and Turkey, and almost the whole length of Europe. How could the yetis ever manage that?
“It’s such a beautiful place, Farley. Soft, mellow brick terraces with peacocks, a deer park, a lake… My Little Ones would be safe there, I know, and it’s just the life for them. Drawing Room Tea, Church on Sundays, Croquet…”
“But, Lady Agatha, it’s years since you left. Anything could have happened to Farley Towers.”
But Lady Agatha said she was certain that her old home was just as she had left it and still in the charge of some dear member of her family who would welcome and care for the yetis just as she had done. “After all,” she said, “An Englishman’s Home is Still His Castle.”
Con was beginning to understand. “Was that why you wanted me to be grown up? So that I could help you to take your yetis to England?”
“So that you could take them for me. I’m far too old to travel. I shall die here in this valley where I have lived so happily.”
Con’s mind was racing ahead, thinking out the yetis’ journey.
“It would have to be a secret, I suppose?”
“Indeed, yes,” said Lady Agatha. “The strictest secret. It would be most dangerous if anyone came upon them before they were safe at Farley Towers.”
Con was silent, his forehead furrowed. “Do yetis hibernate?” he said at last. “Go to sleep through the winter, I mean, like bears?”
“Not hibernate, exactly,” said Lady Agatha, “but in severe weather conditions with extreme cold they can go into a sort of coma. Their heartbeat slows down, and they don’t need food or drink. They can survive almost anything. No yeti has ever died of exposure.”