The Wombles Go round the World (8 page)

(She was perfectly correct. One chapter in
The Womble History of the World, Vol. Ten
is called
The Rescuing of Mr Badger
. Subtitle:
Something awful, dreadful and horrible.
)

‘Never mind that now,' said Tobermory, ‘there goes that Womblex machine again.
Tsk, tsk, tsk
. Come along, Shansi, and don't dawdle!'

.

Chapter Seven

Lost . . .

Wellington woke out of a light sleep and shivered violently. He was wearing his zip-up jacket and hood, boots, mittens and an enormous blue scarf which had been a parting present from Onkel Bonn (he had turned out to be a very stout, jolly Womble who kept going ‘ho, ho, ho' all the time) and, of course, he had his own nice thick fur. So altogether he should have been very warm and cosy indeed. But he wasn't. He was distinctly chilly.

Wellington grunted softly to himself, rubbed the end of his nose and got to his feet. He had got so used to being airborne that he could now move about the trolley without making it sway at all. In fact, when he and Tomsk did touch down at their various burrows of call, they often felt as if the solid ground under their feet was moving about. So now he stepped neatly over the snoring figure of Tomsk and went to inspect the automatic pilot. It was set firm and the propellors were making their usual steady
tick
-
TOCK
ing sound but, in spite of these reassuring facts, Wellington sensed that something, somehow, was wrong.

‘Can't understand it,' Wellington muttered to himself and he checked the controls again. His spectacles seemed to be getting misty, so he took them off, blew on them and cleaned them carefully on the end of the blue scarf. The strange thing was that they began to get cloudy again almost immediately, so he pushed them down to the end of his nose and looked over the top of them. It was a very dark night indeed, with a few stars glittering directly overhead, while to left and right there was just a white haze.

‘Quite pretty, really,' said Wellington, his breath making little white puffy clouds. ‘But v-v-veryc-c-cold. And it shouldn't b-b-be as c-c-cold as this on our route. Atishoooo!'

‘Whassat?' said Tomsk, sitting up in his sleeping bag. ‘Oh, it's you, W-W-Wellington. I say, how about some h-h-hot bracken choc-choc . . .
brrrr
.
OH
!'

Wellington also said ‘Oh!' at the same moment, for, quite suddenly, the white haze all around them stopped being clouds and became very solid-looking indeed.

‘Snow,' said Tomsk in a pleased voice. ‘I say, Wellington, just look at all that snow. Is this Russia?'

‘No. Yes. It c-c-can't be. Not unless we're going in the wrong direction. And we can't be doing that because . . .' said Wellington and stopped suddenly. He bent forward and took a really close look at the controls. They were set hard all right – they were covered in ice!

‘More snow, look,' said Tomsk, sliding out of his sleeping bag and throwing his arms backwards and forwards across his chest. ‘That's just about the most snow I've ever seen.'

Tomsk and Wellington stood side by side in awestruck silence, as an enormous mass of white drifted past them. It seemed to climb right up into the sky.

‘It's big,' said Tomsk, almost tilting over backwards. ‘Bigger even than all of Wimbledon Common. What is it, Wellington?'

‘A m-m-mountain,' said Wellington, his teeth chattering. ‘And there are lots of them. Look.'

As Wombles can see very well in the dark, they had no difficulty in making out they were now travelling along a kind of aerial valley between these vast, snow-covered giants.

‘I like snow,' said Tomsk slowly, ‘but do you think we're in the r-r-right place, Wellington?'

Wellington shook his head. He felt very small, very lost and extremely frightened. According to Tobermory's flight plan they should by now be reaching much warmer weather as they ballooned towards Australia. But what even Tobermory had been unable to anticipate was that the weather was not behaving as it should have done, and that there were all kinds of unexpected crosswinds blowing about and that air pressure was all over the place.

It might have been of some comfort to Wellington and Tomsk to know that at this particular moment Wimbledon Common, which should have been blossoming with spring flowers, was itself under a foot of snow; while Orinoco and Bungo, who had been told quite firmly by Cousin Yellowstone that they had better wrap up against a nip in the air, were, in fact, gasping in the middle of a heatwave. All
they
knew was that they were totally lost in very nasty surroundings.

‘It's definitely not the right place,' said Wellington in a rather wobbly voice. ‘I don't even know what place it is. Oh dear. Sorry.'

‘Nothing to be sorry about. Not your fault,' said Tomsk fairly. ‘Not anybody's fault. The control box thing has got ice all over it. So it's not even
its
fault. Wonder where we are, though.
Brrr
. Let's have some hot choc-choc-choc . . .'

Tomsk blew on his front paws, making an absolute cloud of steam, and undid a flask. He took a deep swallow, gulped and gave the flask to Wellington.

‘Wherever we are it's not bad,' said Tomsk, slapping his paws as he tried to think of the right word to describe the gigantic mountains. ‘Sort of big.'

‘Mm,' agreed Wellington. He swallowed the last of the hot bracken chocolate and felt a little braver, but not much. There didn't seem anything much they could do, but just hope that, iced-up or not, the automatic pilot would get them out of this silent, freezing world of mountain after mountain. Unfortunately, Balloon Two also did not like the cold and it soon became obvious that, whether they liked it or not, they were starting to sink towards those great white slopes.

‘Oh dear,' whispered Wellington.

‘Mmmm,' agreed Tomsk.

They both held their breath as the trolley narrowly missed a jagged, snow-covered crag and then, as though at its last gasp, the balloon gave a soft hiss, lurched and descended gently on to a slope. The trolley tilted slightly and then righted itself, while the propellors bit into the snow, sent up a small flurry of flakes and stopped.

‘No bones broken,' said Tomsk. ‘Now what?'

‘I don't know,' said Wellington. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,
OH DEAR
.'

‘No good making a fuss. Better eat something. Eating makes you warmer.'

The two Wombles, perched on the edge of nowhere, blew on their front paws and then opened their last but one packet of food. As this had been supplied by Onkel Bonn's burrow, it was pumpernickel fruit cake and
Deutschenessel
*
. Both of which, luckily, are full of vitamins as well as being warming and delicious.

‘Perhaps it'll get less cold when the sun comes up,' said Wellington, looking at the inky darkness.

‘Mmmm,' said Tomsk doubtfully. He sighed as he remembered how he had once hoped that they might get lost, so that they could build a shelter and watch out for wild animals and altogether have a nice, interesting adventure. The difficulty was that there was nothing to make a shelter out of, and there were certainly no animals up here in this silent, shimmering, white world.

Tomsk glanced at Wellington and thought deeply. Clever sort of Womble, Wellington. Good at reading books and having ideas and inventing things, but at the moment he was just sitting there and shivering. Well, perhaps he, Tomsk, had better do something.

‘Tell you what,' said Tomsk, ‘we'll make a snow burrow. Plenty of snow about. Come on.'

.

.

Tomsk climbed out of the trolley, fell flat on his face, got up and began to gather armfuls of snow. He'd always liked the cold weather ever since he had taught himself to ski, and after a few minutes he began to enjoy himself as he patted the snow into shape.

‘Going to make a shelter, going to make a burrow,' Tomsk sang in his rumbling voice. ‘Come on, Wellington, lend us a paw.'

But Wellington just sat in the trolley, staring at the ice on the controls and listening to the shrill cry of the wind. He felt as if he couldn't move – in fact, as if he'd never move again, but would just sit here for ever and ever, staring at nothing but the whiteness of the snow. He might even drift off to sleep in spite of being so cold. His head nodded forward and his eyes blinked shut and he was more than three parts asleep when Tomsk's voice rumbled in his ear, ‘Come on, nearly there. We've got a lovely burrow all of our own. Have a look.'

And Wellington was lifted by the scruff of his neck out of the trolley. Tomsk shook him gently, till Wellington's eyes blinked open a couple of times and then widened in real astonishment, for there, on the side of the icy mountain and in the middle of nowhere, was a small snow burrow. It was even furnished with their sleeping bags and belongings, and altogether it looked quite homely and even warm and welcoming.

‘Oh,' said Wellington. ‘I s-s-say. S-s-sorry. Oh, Tomsk.'

‘Not bad, is it,' agreed Tomsk. ‘Home from home. Let's have a grass bread sandwich and a cupful of acorn juice.
I
rather like it here, you know. Quiet.'

They munched and drank in silence, hardly aware of the shrill wind outside because it was remarkably cosy in their snow burrow.

‘G'night,' said Tomsk, zipping himself into his sleeping bag. ‘Things'll look better in the morning, you know.'

‘Yes,' agreed Wellington, ‘and Tomsk, I'm sorry about . . . that is . . . I should have helped . . . oh dear . . .'

‘
Zzzzz
,' was the answer.

‘Yes,' said Wellington and, remarkably, in the middle of nowhere, he too was going ‘
zzzzz
' within a matter of seconds.

Indeed, it seemed only seconds later that both of them were suddenly awakened by the sound of deep, rumbling voices.

‘Whassat?' said Wellington and Tomsk together.

The voices stopped and there was absolute silence apart from the wind. Wellington and Tomsk sat up, stretched, yawned and looked at each other and then at the front door of their snow burrow.

‘Better have a look,' whispered Tomsk. ‘You stay there.'

Tomsk wriggled out of his sleeping bag and crawled on all fours out of the snow burrow. Then he straightened up and looked around, blinking. It was broad daylight now and, for a moment or two, he couldn't see anything at all because the snow was absolutely blinding white and it was like trying to look directly at the sun. So Tomsk put his knuckles into his eyes and rubbed them and tried again. He looked up and down and left and right, went
gmmmm
deep in his throat, took three big breaths and dived back into the burrow.

‘It's, it's . . . haaaaaaar,' said Tomsk and pointed.

Wellington started at him, wondering for a moment if his friend was suffering from Mountain Madness, and then decided to see for himself. He shuffled cautiously out of the burrow on his knees, blinked, knuckled his eyes and went ‘Haaaaar'.

‘Do you see, what I see?' whispered Tomsk.

Wellington nodded violently.

The two young Wombles from Wimbledon got up off their knees and looked left and right and then up and down. They didn't make a sound, because they couldn't think of anything at all to say. Which was hardly surprising, because standing in front of them were four absolutely gigantic snow-white Wombles.

Very slowly and with great dignity one of them stepped forward, put his front paws together and bowed.