Europe felt a sickening doubt as to the permanence of its life and works, and the autumn brought the shrewd and eager fingers of the cold into the streets and houses of Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Ostend, Havre and even Paris. Attention to the vaticinations of science was mingled with the prophetic denunciations of religious frenzy. Pallor marked the features of the rulers of the people, and speechless stupor had seized the common people, who looked to the skies in pitiful confidence that their misery and desolation would touch the heart of that inscrutable Providence, who, reigning beyond the stars, held the reins of the winds and the bit of the frost in his multitudinous omniscience.
But in England, and especially in Scotland, at the opening of the dreadful winter, the precipitation of snow had attained monstrous proportions. For four weeks the vault of the skies had been thick with falling clouds of snow.
Leacraft left the window and descended the solitary halls, no longer swept by groups of tourists, to the street. A broken crease in the snow banks offered him a precarious access to Princes’ street. It appeared almost obliterated in places, at others it seemed a narrow slit between threatening walls of snow, that almost toppled over it, while blinding storms of fine particles, hissing over the undulous surface above, at times poured into the compressed chasm, filling it up many feet in a second of time. Abandoned cars, stalled one behind each other, for a block, both on Princes’ street and under the Castle, in the Lothian road, had become the refuge of the workers, and some were made into improvised hospitals and camps. A few relics, half-starved, and fainting with fatigue and exposure, were being treated with rough consideration in these accidental retreats, which, buried under snow, resembled caves, the feeble light of oil lamps and candles yielding a flickering illumination through the dull chill gloom within them.
Leacraft made his way with difficulty to Princes’ street, and groped along the aisle that cut the street in two. Here he discovered a phalanx of men with sledges and mallets, who, by dint of passing to and fro, without clearing away the snow, were compressing it into a sort of solidity that gave a firm footing. With the continuous fall of snow, and the abrupt windfalls of snow drifting into the cut this path was rapidly rising, and was also most irregular in its outlines. At some points it rose high enough to permit anyone walking on it to see above the adjoining banks of snow. One of these elevations was directly opposite Hanover street, along which formerly ran the cars to the Botanic gardens. Leacraft had reached this spot and stood an instant upon the commanding back of pounded snow, looking with amazement upon the silent waste around him, the sunken gardens to the south marked by a wide superficial depression, with their terraces on either side outlined in shoulders of white. To the north, up the low hill that culminated in George street, he saw the houses on either side buried as high as their second stories in the snow, from which their attic stories emerged like titanic gravestones. The statue of George IV. had become the centre of a rotating whirl of snow that kept the nether limbs of that potentate from the encroaching crystals, but had carved out an inverted cone in the packs around him, whose curling edges hung over like cornices about the strangely excavated bowl. It was at this point that Leacraft’s ears caught a distant sound of mingled cries—a piteous union of a woman’s voice, quickly succeeded by the more robust shout of a man. The sounds seemed to rise and fall. They were at times almost lost in the rising roar of the wind, or reduced to ghost-like semblances of sound, and again they came with the clearest impact on his ears, the shrill scream, the longer resonant “Hallo,” or “Help.” It was impossible for him to determine whether the cries were answering each other, or whether they indicated a mutual and consentaneous peril.
He was not alone in their detection. A number of figures—those of the men engaged in keeping the paths open—all sheeted like ghosts with a pellicle of icy snow, had slowly gathered about him, drawn together by this weird summons. A distinct horror possessed them. There was somewhere in the immobile and voiceless streets before them at least two perishing lives. Could they be found? Could they be extricated from their rising tomb of snow? At times the voices grew fainter, as if their subjects were surrendering their vitality to cold and exhaustion, and then again they sounded in the approaching darkness—there were now no lights at night in the doomed city—more appealingly clear as if by a despairing struggle of strength they hoped to prolong their fruitless invocation. No one spoke. Leacraft broke the silence.
“We must save them,” he said.
“It’s nae canny wark to do,” muttered one of the shapes nearest to him.
“But it’s a grewsome matter to let them dee that wa,” urged a second.
“Weel, weel, they’re nae the farst. The country side is as fu’ o corpses as a crow’s gizzard o’ oats,” admonished a third.
Leacraft had been listening. He felt sure that the sounds proceeded from somewhere on George street, a little to the eastward of its intersection with Hanover. He suspected that the fugitives had taken refuge in St. Andrew’s Church. He turned to look at the muffled forms about him. “If two of you will help me, with snow-shoes we can reach them.”