Brig and Ned Garrett came into the room, and soon the discussion of the strange events taking place at the Isthmus occupied the group, to which in a few minutes Mr. and Mrs. Garrett were added.
Leacraft shortened his visit under the pretext of an engagement in New York, and it was years after that he again saw Miss Sally Garrett—then become Mrs. Brig Barry—after the stupendous facts on the following pages had made the Kingdom of Great Britain part of the Frozen North.
CHAPTER V.
THE EVICTION OF SCOTLAND.
Alexander Leacraft was standing at a window in the upper story of the Caledonia Railroad station in Edinburgh, November 28th, 1909, and was gazing with fixed and tormented eyes upon an unusual scene. The sky beyond Carlton Hill was leaden grey with the blear dullness of a snow-laden atmosphere, and a singular and menacing bar of half-eclipsed red light, like a cooling bar of incandescent iron, shone with irregular palpitations through the descending sheets of snow. It was a strange and appalling picture. Already a week’s precipitation had filled up the deep moat of the Princes’ street gardens, choked up the tracks of the North British Railroad, mounded the ragged edges and wandering parapets of the Citadel, until its outlines were effaced in a colossal accumulation, like a titanic snowball, and a long incline of spotless snow sloped to St. Cuthbert’s Church, itself half buried in the powdery blanket. The blurred lineaments of Calton Hill, so familiar and so beloved by Scotchmen, were uncertainly descried, the Nelson monument, the unfinished peristyle, the mediaeval ranges of the penitentiary, the cheese box summit of the observatory (already the large group of buildings on the Pentland Hills had disappeared from sight), and the classic sombreness of the college fascade. Had Leacraft been near at hand, he would have seen that the monument to Scott—the tribute to one fame by the aspiring genius of another, dead before fame had quite enrolled him in her categories—was deeply buried, and that the inclined head of the Wizard was quickly vanishing under the piled up pillows of billowy snow.
Alexander held a field-glass in his hand; the window at which he stood was open, and the snow blowing in upon it had raised a mound about his feet. The observer was, however, oblivious to this invasion; he leaned far out, and turned his inspection from point to point with rapid movements and obvious anxiety. A curious thing was happening immediately below him, and astonished him. In the leafless branches of the churchyard trees had gathered a vast concourse of crows, and the black-feathered congress was being momentarily augmented by new arrivals streaming in from all quarters, too evidently dislodged from more natural and habitual resorts. Their discordant cries seemed a melancholy symbol of doom. An awful silence otherwise possessed the Athens of the North. It was practically a deserted city, and its desertion was only part of a widespread calamity which now had begun the shocking chapter of national eviction.
The usual hum and bustle of the streets had gone; the tramcars no longer trundled through its streets, and a half-hearted effort to make a path along the centre of Princes street accommodated a few distracted pedestrians and official retainers, yet unwilling to join the army of migration which had slowly moved away from a city, that the pitiless rigor of a new dispensation in climate had doomed to a wintry burial.
Alexander Leacraft himself awaited reluctantly the departure of a train of emergency which was expected to carry away the last remnants of Edinburgh’s population. He had come to the unfortunate city freighted with misgivings, when the news reached London—itself experiencing peculiar vicissitudes—of the terrifying severity and earliness of the winter in Scotland. He recalled his forebodings, which the President’s speech had awakened, though the later reports of the complete reversal of the Gulf Stream into the Pacific, and the accomplished destruction of the Central American Neck of land had already stirred the scientific minds of England to the utterance of half-hearted warnings.
The matter had now suddenly loomed up into a frightful reality, and the devastating storms sweeping out of the black heart of the north, had brought Scotland, the Faroe Islands and Iceland into a common fate of extinction. The sheltering power of the Gulf Stream was removed from Great Britain, and the frost of the Arctic world, so long repulsed, but now no longer compressed within the Arctic circle, expanded with instantaneous certainty, spreading the shroud of its killing cold over the same latitudes in Europe that for ages had slept beneath its spell in America.
The population in part of the north of Scotland had escaped by means of ships to other countries or to southern England. Many villages, isolated houses, and remote districts had suffered cruel hardships, and the entombed bodies of thousands of families waited for a recovery which perhaps only in ages “yet unborn” could come to them. The white burden of snow mantled the valleys and hillsides of Scotland, the higher hills of the Trossachs, and the Grampians, the defiant crest of Goat Fells in Arran, and the twin peaks of the Island of the Holy Mount. Enormous drifts had risen in white waves almost to the summit of Bruce’s monument at Sterling, and the old Abbey of Cambuskenneth had disappeared. Ice of great thickness prevailed in the Clyde, and the movement of the tides had forced it up in threatening hummocks upon the drab stone cottages and villas of Greenock and Gourock. From Aberdeen to Leith the cities had been slowly deserted, after desperate efforts to free them from their entombment. The trains going south to England were loaded with the rich contents of mansions and summer castles; agonizing scenes had been witnessed at a thousand points where the heart-broken people sadly turned their backs upon all they had, and all they loved and knew. Heroic rescues were as numerous as the occasions demanding courage and inflexible daring had been frequent. Throughout Great Britain the trembling soul of the nation shrunk upon itself with a nameless dread, as it suddenly found its existence confronted with the inexorable processes of nature, when the appalling and relentless squadrons of the Ice King, with vengeful speed, issued in all the fierce panoply of wind and hideous life-killing cold, from the last tenements of their abode, to slay a prosperous and proud people.