BOUT A HUNDRED YEARS AGO SOMETHING dreadful happened in the mountains near Tibet A beautiful young girl called Lady Agatha Farlingham was sleeping peacefully in a tent pitched on a ledge below the summit of a mountain known as Nanvi Dar Beside her wearing a green woolly nightcap against the bitter cold slept her father the Earl of Farley and in another tent close by slept their three porters tough natives of the Himalayas who carried their baggage and looked after them The Earl had come to the roof of the world to search for rare and unknown plants that grew only in these high and dangerous places He was a famous plant hunter and he liked his daughter Agatha too much to leave her at home in England
doing all the boring things that girls had to do in those days like painting pictures of ruins or taking walks with their governess or visiting the poor who often preferred to be left alone Soon after midnight on that awful night Lady Agatha was woken by a most strange and unearthly sound an eerie and mournful noise like a train with indigestion She sat up pulled her father’s heavy tweed jacket around her shoulders and bravely stepped outside And then it happened Out of the blackness and the snow there loomed a ghastly gigantic hairy THING Before she could even scream a pair of huge brown arms grasped the terrified girl and then the foul beast turned and leaping swiftly back up the sheer side of the mountain vanished out of sight The poor Earl and his porters searched and searched for many days risking death in the cruel blizzards and the raging wind but it was useless The fresh snow had wiped out all possible tracks Only a blue bedsock kicked off by the struggling girl remained to Lady Agatha’s distraught father He took it back to England to his ancestral home at Farley Towers and slept with it under his pillow for the rest of his life And when people asked him what had happened to his lovely daughter he always said she must have lost her memory and wandered away and been buried by an avalanche Because he simply wouldn’t believe what all the porters told him that his daughter had been carried away by a yeti that vile monster who can tear a human being limb from limb or crunch one up in a single bite A creature so terrible and fearsome that it is known as the Abominable Snowman But of course the porters were right Agatha had been carried away by a yeti He had run with her high over the
