And so the hated Sultan was seen no more, and in the city of Aslerfan there was feasting and rejoicing and dancing in the streets. People hugged each other and let off fireworks and threw open the doors of their cafés so that everyone could eat and drink their fill. The prisoners were let out of their dungeons and the sick were taken off the streets and cared for. But because it was the animals who had brought freedom to the people, the new government made it a law that all the animals that had escaped were to be guests of the city and not to be harmed. So, for many months, while they built a new, model zoo for those animals that preferred to live in town, you could see cars edging around giraffes dozing in the middle of the road, barbers politely shaving wildebeests who had wandered into their shops, or old ladies giving lifts to porcupines in their shopping baskets.
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 THE beautiful 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 …
Poor Leo, though
t Con, looking up at the crags of Death Peak, where the rain that was now lashing their windscreen would, he knew, be falling as drifting, blinding snow. And he thought with a pang of homesickness of his own father, who might sometimes throw bags of flour but who never came up with idiot ideas like making a man of his son.
About three hundred feet below the top of the pass, Perry gave up. The lorry had started its chicken-with-the-croup noises, and though the windscreen wipers were working on the double, it was impossible to keep the windows clear of sleet. To try to make the descent down one of the most dangerous and winding roads in Europe in weather like that would have been madness, even with an empty lorry. As it was …
So he turned off into a deserted quarry, which ran off the curve of the road and provided some shelter. “We’ll have to spend the night here, I’m afraid,” he said.
The yetis, of course, loved the idea. “Isn’t it fresh, isn’t it bracing?” they said, and for an awful moment it looked as though Grandma would begin to yodel again.
But after a while, Con and Perry began to get worried about Ellen. It was bitterly cold at that height, and though they kept the windows tightly closed, the chill seeped right through their clothes and the thin army blanket that was all they had for covering. Ellen never complained, but she was a frail, slight child and now she had no way of hiding the whiteness of her face or the shivering fits that shook her.
“Listen,” said Perry to Con, “do you see that building up there, on Death Peak? On that rocky ledge?”
Con nodded.
“It’s a monastery. The monks that run it are great people—they’re always helping travelers in trouble. They train St. Bernards, too—those mountain rescue dogs. You can reach it in half an hour and the path’s perfectly safe.”
“You mean I should take Ellen up there and ask if we can spend the night?”
“That’s right. But go now, quickly. You’ve only another hour till dark.”
“But what about the yetis?” said Con.
“I’ll look after them. They’ll be all right, I promise.”
Con threw another glance at Ellen, huddled in the corner of the cab and trying to stop her teeth from chattering. “All right,” he said.
An hour later, safe from the storm, the children were sitting over steaming bowls of soup and hunks of fresh-baked bread in the monastery dining hall.
It was a beautiful room. Candles burned on the long wooden table; there were heavy carved oak settles and a blazing fire of pine logs in which the resin bubbled and sang.
But Con and Ellen couldn’t take their eyes from what was lying in a huge, warm huddle of feet and melting eyes and thumping tails across the hearth. Five dogs. Five of the most beautiful dogs they had ever seen: white and brown; gold and liver-colored; fawn and mahogany; all with wrinkled foreheads and slobbery jowls. The famous St. Bernards of Feldenberg.
And while the children ate their soup, the friendly monks, clustering round, told them—in a jumble of languages—the story of the dogs.
For a long time, they explained, people had stopped using dogs for mountain rescue work because they were so expensive to train and modern devices like helicopters and radar seemed to make them unnecessary. But a very rich and kind American, an oil millionaire from Texas who had come to Feldenberg for a holiday, had been so upset to think that those wonderful dogs were no longer bred and trained that he had sent the monks a litter of five of the most highly bred St. Bernards in America—and given the monastery a huge sum of money to be used each year for the feeding and training of the dogs.
“How marvelous!” said Con, scratching the ear of an enormous white-and-liver-colored brute who had fallen asleep across his feet. “And have they rescued anyone yet?”
The monks looked at each other and said no. Fortunately, Death Peak was a very dangerous mountain that people treated with respect, so nobody had needed rescuing. A silence fell. And then, suddenly, perhaps because Con and Ellen had very listening faces, it all came out.
The dogs, said Brother Peter (and all the others nodded to show that they agreed with him), were the most charming, gentle animals that anyone could wish for. The monks adored them; they couldn’t bear to think of life without them. There was only one snag. They were absolutely useless at rescuing anyone from anything.
The children found this almost impossible to believe.
“But I thought … all St. Bernards …” stammered Con.
The monks shook their heads and sighed. Most, perhaps, but not all. Certainly not Baker or Brutus or Biscuit and quite definitely not Bouncer or Beelzebub.
And one by one, kind Brother Peter, who was in charge of the kennels, introduced the dogs and explained their little troubles.
Baker, it seemed, suffered from chilblains—nasty big pink lumps that came up as soon as he set foot in the snow. Brutus, on the other hand, couldn’t stand heights. They had lifted Brutus onto a table once to have his toenails cut and he had very nearly fainted. Biscuit was terrified of the dark and had to have a night-light in his kennel. Bouncer, a real bruiser of a dog whose muscles beneath his brindled fur rippled like steel, cried like a baby when he had to get his feet wet.
“But that one?” said Ellen. “That huge dark one over there?”
The monks blushed. What was wrong with Beelzebub seemed to be a little different. Then, very shyly, Brother Peter leaned forward and whispered: “He drinks.”
And he explained that every St. Bernard was sent off with a keg of brandy round his neck so that when the lost traveler was found he could have a healing sip. Beelzebub, however, was driven so mad by the smell of brandy that he simply shattered the keg against the first rock he could find, lapped up the contents, and had to be carried home and put to bed.
And because the monks were good and honest men, they had decided that it wasn’t fair to go on deceiving the people of Feldenberg and taking the American’s money, so they had decided to send the dogs away the very next day. “But it will be like giving away our children,” said Brother Peter, and all the monks looked so sad that for a moment, Con and Ellen, used as they were to yetis, expected them all to burst into tears.
“But if no one ever needs rescuing,” said Ellen, who couldn’t bear anyone to be unhappy, “what does it matter?”
What happened next was just like in a play or a film. There was a violent pounding on the door and a man stumbled forward into the room. He was dressed in climbing clothes, his face was badly cut and bruised, and his leg dragged as he came forward.
“Help! I must have help quickly! It’s my son, my little Leo. He’s lost on Death Peak. Send out the dogs to save him! Please … quickly … send out … the dogs,” said Mr. Letts—and Brother Peter was just in time to catch him as he fell.
HE MONKS PUT OUT THE DOGS. WHAT ELSE could they do? They pushed out Biscuit, howling because of the terrifying darkness, and Baker, trying to keep his chilblained feet out of the snow. They pushed out Brutus, who got giddy on a kitchen table, and the whimpering Bouncer and boozy Beelzebub with his barrel …
And then, while the younger monks went down to the village for help, the rest of them went back into the dining hall and waited for disgrace and ruin.
Con had known all along, really, what he had to do. When a child’s life was at stake, you had to take a chance. Even Lady Agatha, he knew, would have wanted him to let the yetis out. Only they could save Leo.
He went over to the fire where Ellen was helping to care for the delirious Mr. Letts as he rambled and blamed himself for the accident. Then the boy slipped out of the monastery and, with his head bent against the gale, ran back downhill toward the yellow lorry.
The yetis, when he reached them, understood at once. “Don’t worry, my boy,” said Uncle Otto reassuringly. “We shall find him. Remember, we can see in the dark.”
“After all, we are rescuing yetis,” said Ambrose smugly—and while Perry made his way down to the village to join a stretcher party, and Con set off for the monastery once more, the yetis p
added up the steep sides of the quarry and were gone.
Even for the yetis it was bitterly cold on Death Peak. As they padded across the treacherous glacier, leaped crevasses, and peered into gullies, the snow beat against their faces and the wind scythed like a rapier through their fur. But they let nothing hinder them in their search for Leo. Patiently, clinging with their eight toes to knife edges of ice, they squeezed down chimneys of rock, dug into snowdrifts, raked the darkness with their saucer eyes …
There was nothing. No answer to their calls. No trace of the boy.
“I don’t want him to be dead,” said Ambrose in a quavery voice, clambering up a pinnacle of ice. “I don’t want anyone to be dead, ever.”
But things were beginning to look very bad for Leo. And now Grandma was in trouble. She was, after all, over four hundred years old. Shivering fits shook her, her breath came in painful gasps, and her legs felt like matchsticks.
“Come on, you stupid old yeti,” she scolded herself. “Here’s a poor child in trouble and you totter about like an old pudding.”
But though she was cross with herself, she couldn’t make her heart pump harder or her muscles pull her up the towering cliffs of rock.
“I’ll just rest for a moment,” said Grandma. “I’ll crawl into this little cave here and then I’ll be as right as rain.”
She dragged herself into the cave and flopped down on a slab of stone, but still she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Grandma did not often feel old and sad and useless, but she felt it now.
And then, in the back of the cave, she saw something stir: a fair blur; a faint, small shape. She moved closer, bent over it.
And after that she didn’t feel old and sad and useless anymore; she felt as happy as she’d ever felt in her life. She had found Leo.
And now a solemn procession wound itself down Death Peak toward the monastery below.
First came Uncle Otto: pathfinding, responsible, and serious. Then came Ambrose, beaming with pride because Grandma, who was still feeling rather tottery, had let him carry Leo. Tottery she might be, but not so tottery that she couldn’t constantly peer over Ambrose’s shoulder and tell him what to do with the boy.