During all this time since their entrance through the window of the church, Leacraft and Jim had remained tied together, and the strong, steady haul of the workman upon the rope now greatly assisted Leacraft, who was quite sensible that he must largely depend on his strength at this critical moment for their preservation. It was certainly no exaggeration to say that as they entered that rather inconspicuous gateway, between two snow drifts in George street, Edinburgh, in November 1909, they stood on that metropolitan thoroughfare, in the Jaws of Death. The simile may sound and look shockingly untrue. It is the exact truth. The white inclines rose on each side of them, and the width of the wintry embrasure was about twenty feet; in less than a minute even with their lagging steps they would have crossed it. Suddenly Leacraft felt himself pulled sideways; only the rope stretched tightly between himself and Jim saved him from falling, if falling it could be called, where they were so immersed in snow. Thomsen had dropped in his tracks and with a low cry of fear the woman’s arm slipped from his neck and she clung convulsively to Leacraft. It was critical. In a little more than two minutes they would probably be buried—which at this stage of exhaustion meant death. Leacraft tugged savagely at the rope, and the surprised Jim, almost thrown on his back, returned. A glance told him everything. Leacraft, without speaking, nodded to the motionless figure, beginning by reason of the icy chill smiting his face from the snow, to stir, and seizing the girl, passed on. Jim managed to jerk Thomsen to his feet, and half holding, half pushing him, hastened, lest Leacraft should feel his weight on the rope, and be hampered in his own struggles. It was slow work, the snow-shoes, so essential for their safety, could only be painfully shoved forwards beneath the snow. It was like wading in deep water but it was a likeness enormously enlarged in difficulty and strain.
They had not pushed through the miniature defile when symptomatic showers of snow drifted in upon them in blinding columns. The avalanche was coming. The terror stricken Alpine climber, who, behind some serac on the lofty glacier, has his ears assaulted with the roar of the descending avalanche, in no literal sense has greater reason for fear than did those men in the streets of Edinburgh at that moment.
Leacraft shouted, “On! On! On! One second and we are lost!” This despairing cry was not ill calculated to spur their efforts. The very agony of fright it summoned in the two men behind him gave them the strength of desperation. For one instant the spent muscles became steel. They floundered forward, and fell together almost in one heap beyond the portal of the two mounds as the swirling snow in torrents obliterated their outlines in new envelopes. Their fall toppled Leacraft over on his side. The confused objects, looking like some assortment of discarded bundles lay quiet, the darting cold had brought with it the treacherous drowsiness into their eyes, and had already begun to lock the keyholes of their senses. It was Jim who had roused himself to action. He struck Leacraft across the face with his gloved hand, and did the same to Thomsen, whom he again lifted to his feet. The smart of the stinging blow startled Leacraft on his legs; his nose bled, and he could feel the woman still stiffly clinging to him. It was Jim who now uttered the warning, “Get out o’ this. I hae the lugger all right. Get down to the bank.” Leacraft looked quickly. The bank steps were beneath them, and the vagaries of the storm alternately covered and cleared them of snow. Half rolling, he pitched down the slope, following Jim, who had his arm around Thomsen’s waist, and who, supporting himself on Jim’s shoulder, was manfully helping his rescuer.
In a few minutes, with staggering steps and frequent falls, the four gained the protection of the bank. This refuge acted favorably. Their spirits revived, and the whisky flasks assisted. Their attitude toward the storm became a little defiant. “We can do it now. It’s only a step around to Princes street. Ethel, how do you feel?” It was the young Scotchman who spoke, and the young woman even smiled as she answered “O! Ned, we shall be saved! How can we thank this gentleman?” “Excuse me” blurted out Leacraft, “we won’t waste time just now in an exchange of civilities. The opportunity for that formality will come when we are all out of this.”
He stepped almost impatiently to the edge of the building and found that a narrow crevice intervened between the drifts and the walls of the houses, and a further inspection revealed the utterly unexpected good luck, that this peculiar chimney way extended along the west side of St. David street to Princes street. Their safety seemed secured. In a few minutes after this welcome discovery, with careful steps, Leacraft insisting upon the Scotchman and himself lifting the young woman together, with Jim leading, the party slowly crept out and along the buildings on St. David street, and in a short time had reached Princes street, where more arms, vigorous legs, and robust bodies helped them through the shooting drifts into the open rift, that the men and sledges were still precariously maintaining.
Leacraft hurried Thomsen and his charge to the hotel; he turned to Jim, and grasped his hand fervently, “You’ve been a true man, Jim. I shan’t forget this. Every one leaves Edinburgh to-night by the train. I want you in my compartment. This young woman and her friends will be with me. I’ll find you at the hotel before the train leaves. Watch for me.” As he spoke, and before the expostulation on Jim’s lips was uttered, a long hoarse whistle like a wail came to their ears. It was the warning of the trainmen fearful to delay longer their departure from the doomed city—and with it, hurrying steps, shouts and injunctions along the cut, indicated its recognition.
“Come with me,” cried Leacraft, and together the men ran forwards, towards the Lothian road, finding themselves as they advanced in a jostling crowd, animated by but one hope, escape from the buried capital.
The condition indicated in the foregoing narrative, may now be more explicitly reviewed. The dislocations and subsidences in the Caribbean and Central American areas had developed along constructional lines, and had swept away the lesser Antilles and the Isthmus.
These formerly elevated points were simply projections upon two orogenic blocks of the earth’s crust, one extending from South America to Porto Rico, the other the narrower coastal shelf forming the isthmus. More plainly, these remarkable strips, curved in outline, and with a varying length of four hundred to five hundred miles, maintained a precarious stability with references to the adjoining edges against which they abutted, and when a shock, violent enough to rupture or release those edges, supervened they fell out and down like a brick or stone from an arch. When the more eastern of these blocks, that on which the lesser Antilles stood, dropped, the oceanic heated currents of the equatorial belt of the Atlantic rushed into the Caribbean basin as usual, but with a perceptible acceleration. The currents did not meet the frictional resistance of an archipelago of small islands. Their progress westward continued, through the almost simultaneously created outlet into the Pacific, by the submergence of the isthmus. Upon the first report of President Roosevelt’s apprehensions that this catastrophe would involve a disastrous diversion of the Gulf Stream, European geographers had contemptuously treated it as impossible, and stigmatized it as “an amusing futility of envy.” They dwelt upon this fact, that the Gulf Stream did not invade the bent arm of water forming the eastern water boundary of the Isthmus of Panama, but shot across this somewhat withdrawn angle, passing with undiminished volume in a straight path beyond Honduras, into the capacious pocket of the Gulf of Mexico. “Let it be conceded,” began an authoritative refutation in the London Times, “that the structural impediment to the mixture of the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific existing in the Isthmus of Panama is removed. Does mixture follow? By no means, that is in no way subversive of present hydrographic conditions. There will be a marginal intermixture, of course, where there is actual contact, but it is presumptuous and opposed to experience to say that two enormous bodies of water will promiscuously exchange their contents through an opening, relatively to their volume and extent, what a pinhole would be to the juxtaposed masses of two great reservoirs. Further, this disinclination, as a physical impossibility, of the waters of the two contiguous bodies of practically equal density to diffuse into each other, is increased by the strength and velocity of the Gulf Stream itself, which rushes past the isthmus deflection, and instead of being turned aside into that narrow aperture, would exert a suctorial influence upon the tides of the Pacific, actually (though this is in no way insisted upon) reinforcing its own volume and momentum by their contributions.
“There can be no valid reasons for anxiety in regard to the future of the kingdom so far—and that is very far indeed—as its prosperity and happiness depend upon a continuance of the supply of warm waters from the west.”