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.
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.”
There was at first no response, only a protesting shrug, and a
disposition to avoid any direct refusal by moving away. Leacraft
spoke again. “The snow packs easily; we can get there on snow-shoes
in a short time. There can be no danger. These unfortunate people are
imprisoned in the church, I think; there’s a woman there; the man needs
help to get her out; he probably could break his way over here, but he
can’t drag her with him, and he won’t leave her. It’s murder to turn
our backs on them.”
Leacraft was alone, save for the presence of the second speaker. The
rest had disappeared, and the thud of their mallets and the rattle of
the sledges acquainted him with their distant operations.
“Meester, I’ll gie ye a haud. There’s snaw-shoes down the track in a
tram; I’ll hae them here in a jiffy.” He vanished down the long cut.
Leacraft called after him: “Bring two bottles of whiskey. You can use
my name for them at the hotel.”
While he waited for the man’s return, Leacraft outlined a possible
avenue of approach to the imprisoned couple, if couple it was. He could
indistinctly see--the day was waning--that on the west side of Hanover
street, by reason of the north-westerly direction of the storm, the
housetops had formed a partial protection to the street below, and
that the heavy ridged hill of snow occupied the centre of the street,
lurching over against the west. Up the short slope this partial shelter
continued, but in George street, beyond, the storm drove scurrying
blasts of wind that whirled the snow upward in fantastic pirouetting
volleys, and, doubtless, with wicked intent, had piled the drifts up
in insurmountable entrenchments against the doors of the buildings on
that street. The prospect of progress there was discouraging. Still
there would be ways; the renewed calls nerved him to desperation.
The volunteer returned with the snow-shoes, a pair for both of them,
and an extra pair for the imprisoned man, and the bulging bulk of three
bottles of whiskey. He explained the latter excess: “They gied me the
thraw, and I had no heart to haud the ither back. Let well eneugh
alone, I say.”
“Now, my brave friend, we must know each other’s name, though we shall
not be separated, as we must be tied together. But men working in peril
become close companions,” said Leacraft to the man.
“Weel, sir, it mak’s sma’ difference what name we go by, but, an’ you
like it, just ca’ me Jim.”
Leacraft opened one of the bottles of whiskey, and handed it to his
companion, who eagerly accepted the invitation, and took so hearty a
draught that Leacraft felt some misgivings over his usefulness. The man
explained: “Ut’s no dram habit I have, sir, but the cauld ha’ gone to
mee bains, an’ the wee drap pits fire in my sperit. It’s bonny stuff.
It’s nae mickle harm to keep the fires burning in a blast like this.
Tak’ my advice and do the same yoursel’, sir.”
Leacraft was indeed not unwilling to follow this example, and thus
reinforced, the two men plunged into the snow banks that with
irregular surfaces of hills and valleys spread before them. They
floundered desperately forward, finding that the snow-shoes were
indispensable, and the precaution of being tied together most helpful.
The calling voices, with intermittent pauses, were still heard, and
both Leacraft and his companion exerted themselves to return the calls
with reassurance. It was evident that they had, at least at times,
been heard, for the distant shouts became timed to their own, and this
indication of recognition served to strengthen and increase their
efforts. The work was difficult, and with recurrent accesses of the
storm’s fury, the snowy wreaths, detached from the cornices of the
houses, or whirled from off the edges of the tumultuous drifts, blinded
and overwhelmed them. Fortunately, the wind came in gusts, and it was
this circumstance that permitted Leacraft first to hear the voices.
Between the wintry assaults of the wind, in the pauses of its fury,
they stumbled on, forcing their way under the shelter of the western
houses, and, at the corner of George street, struck boldly out towards
the monument, where Leacraft had discerned the inverted cone of snow.
The cause of this formation was now apparent, and rendered their
further progress more precarious. The wind surged down George street,
and by a slight deflection in its course from the axis of the street
itself, was thrown into a vertical motion at the corners of Hanover
street, and became a cyclone, whose towering and fiercely moving walls
were materialized to the eye in the successive shells of snow raised
in oscillating spires above the tops of the houses, where it again
was seized by the direct wind and sent in dusky masses skywards. The
picture of George street at this point was appalling enough. The snow
lay deeply piled in the street, forming a high central ridge, and
crossing this obliquely were traverse drifts which had a slow motion
down the street towards the Melvill memorial; these even at times
coalesced, assuming the aspect of a big comber at sea, and advancing
with similar menace. When these snow billows flowed into the depression
about the statue, they filled it, and then the revolving winds, like a
gigantic and invisible augur, excavated it again, tossing the snow out
in spurts resembling the geyser-like bursts in front of a snow-plough.
At such moments it would have been almost impossible to have crossed
the spot, with the buffeting wind shaking with flagitious fury the
folds of snow about the traveller and entombing him also in their
rising sheets.
Leacraft and Jim had just reached the eastern edge of the hollow
described above, when one of the travelling billows of snow poured
into the pit on its western margin, and the impetuous blasts began to
dislodge the inrushing tide with incredible velocity. The shocks of
snow overwhelmed the rescuers, and for a moment it seemed as if the
contest between them and the fury of nature was too unequal a struggle.
The support of the snow-shoes held them fairly well above the snow,
but this onslaught knocked them down, and once down, the industrious
drifts hastily began their entombment. To speak was impossible, and
all Leacraft could do was to jerk the rope which connected them, as
a summons for Jim to reach him. His purpose was obvious. Together,
one or the other might make such a purchase of his companion as to
extricate himself, and then assist his friend to rise. Jim understood
the suggestion of the pull, and groped his way forward, and touched
Leacraft, whom he found prostrate. His body offered a flooring for
him to rise upon, and in this way he regained the surface, his head
emerging into the blustering air. He quickly established himself and
hauled Leacraft upward, who expected the movement, and had drawn his
knees upward to help him regain his feet. The two men were now again
upright and in action, but terribly exhausted and half immersed in the
snow. The wave had passed and reformed partially after its disruption,
while its north and south wings, which had escaped the passage of the
pit, like white breakers, moved on before it.
A simultaneous motion with both, which had something almost comic
in it, and would not have, under different circumstances, escaped
receiving its tribute of merriment, brought from the pockets of each
the whisky bottles, that quickly contributed some of their contents
to the renewal of their ebbing strength. As they carefully replaced
the helpful vials, they heard again, but now more clearly, the renewed
shouts of the imprisoned captives, and Jim, putting his hands to his
mouth, screamed with all the force he could put into the effort,
“Coming.” It carried, and something articulate returned, which to
Leacraft sounded like “Come quick!”
Their strength renewed, the two men began again their brave combat
with the elements, and forced their way across the snow fields towards
the houses on the north side of George street, which furnished a
slight shield against the ferocity of the storm. A helpful lull in the
blast enabled them to make their way more quickly. The walls of St.
Andrew’s Church were near at hand, and all doubts as to the position
of the voices were removed. The calls came very clearly to their ears.
Creeping along the edges of the houses, they succeeded in reaching the
church, and found that, on the back of the drifts, they were then at
the level of its upper windows. The men peered into the darkness beyond
the panes of glass and knocked vociferously. Voices and steps answered
them. The next moment a man’s figure could be discerned advancing, and
then the window opened. Leacraft entered first, followed by Jim, and
both turned to the yet silent figure beside them. His silence lasted
scarcely an instant. “God!” he exclaimed. “You have come none too soon!
We should have died here! There is a young girl downstairs, a friend
of mine. We started for the train, and just in front of the church she
fainted. I drew her in here, as the door was open. A chill followed; I
could not carry her away in this storm, and we were caught. It was our
last chance. I can’t explain now the reason for our remaining so long
behind the rest of the people who have left Edinburgh. We are here.
Can you get us out? I can shift for myself, but Ethel--you see it is
impossible. What--what--”
Leacraft interrupted. “Explanations are not needed. We must all get out
of this at once. We must take her between us, and fight our way back.”
Already he had begun to move towards the flight of stairs near to them,
to descend to the man’s companion, when the man seized him by the
arm, passed him, calling to them to follow. They descended rapidly,
and saw on the ground floor of the church, lying in a pew, with a
flickering gas jet burning feebly above it, the figure of the woman
the man had mentioned. She had propped herself on her hand and elbow,
and gazed at the three faces looking down on her, with a frightened,
still expression, in which relief and confidence, however, were not
altogether absent. Jim had already brought out the whisky bottle, and,
with unpractised directness, offered it to the girl. “Here, my leddy;
tak’ a sip of this, and let it be a good one. An’, gentlemen,” turning
to Leacraft and the stranger, “it’s awa’ with a’ o’ us, or the deil
will mak’ our shrouds.”
Leacraft turned to the man. “Have you snow-shoes?” he asked. “Yes,”
answered the stranger. “Then,” continued Leacraft, “we will start. Out
of the window upstairs. Jim, you go ahead, and I and the gentleman will
carry the lady. Madame,” to the lady, “this is a forlorn trip, but it
will soon be over, and I feel we can trust you to help us.”
“Oh, yes,” came the rapid reply. The girl started to rise, and her
companion helped her quickly to her feet. The party was ready, and
without further words the four ascended the steps, made their way to
the window, and after one glance at the raging weather outside, another
reassurance for all from the indispensable bottles, the plunge was made.
The two fugitives, if such was a proper designation for them, were well
clothed, and the risk of exposure was avoided. It now was a question of
physical endurance only, and partly, too, of some possible leniency in
the weather. Already their previous steps were thickly buried in the
flowing tides of snow, and Leacraft and Jim noted with apprehension
that the wind seemed fiercer, and the way back towards Hanover street
blacker and more obscure, with volleys of snow dust thrown upward in
increasing clouds. For a moment the party hesitated, and Leacraft and
Jim both seemed over-awed and perplexed. Almost at the same moment they
cast their eyes towards the corner of George and St. David streets, and
saw to their wonder and delight that the front of the Commercial Bank
building was relatively clear of snow, and the intimation furnished by
its appearance was that the way was more open on St. David street and
that in that direction egress and safety lay.
“This way,” was the laconic order from Leacraft, and they turned
eastward. Leacraft and the stranger, who had given his name as Thomsen,
supported the woman between them, and she was directed to throw her
arms around their necks, and the sense of support to this frail girl,
whose face, terrified and pale from weakness, yet had revealed to
Leacraft a winning prettiness, made both men alert and strenuous. An
obstacle of some seriousness stood before them; two heaped up mounds
occupied the centre of the street. It was between these mimic hills
that they made the fortunate discovery of the comparative freedom of
the opposite corner, as it was in a measure the interposition of these
very barriers that kept it so. But the passage--the cleft--between
these mounds, that somehow seemed rigid points, underwent startling
alterations. It was filled up with avalanches of snow, which at almost
regular intervals were driven out by the massive wind pressure, and
the dislodged bodies of snow were seen to spread out toward the south
on the opposite side of the mounds from the observers’ position, in
geyser-like spouts. It was necessary to thread this pass, but it would
be inevitable danger if they were caught in one of the recurrent
avalanches. Sinister as the chance seemed, it must be taken. And
towards this triangular cut they slowly moved. Jim was in front of the
little group, which, sheeted with snow, with bent heads and in silence,
resembled Arctic explorers, as they are pictured bringing in some dying
or exhausted companion.
The wind was somewhat behind them, though in the collision of the
reflected waves from the houses on the south side, the vexed air shot
about them in a hundred contradictory directions, and held them in a
tempest of draughts. And now they were at the northern slope of the
mounds; the cut was open; it had been cleared a minute before. Through
it they saw more plainly that the bank steps and the corner of St.
David street presented more favorable conditions; a dash and they
would effect their escape. Leacraft had not failed to notice that the
intervals between the inexplicable down-rushes of snow into the gap,
were about three minutes, and that something more than that time
elapsed before their expulsion. He whispered to Thomsen, whose fatigue
was becoming too evident, “Keep up, sir. Once through this hole, and we
are safe.”
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.”
The writer of this article in the _London Times_ had not realized, or
had not heard of, the elevation of Cuba and the emergence of the broken
range of keys between Cape Gracias de Dios and Jamaica, nor had he
considered the “suctorial influence” of the Mexican current in the
Pacific, southward on the west coast of Mexico and Central America upon
the Atlantic areas, nor had he suspected the quantitative effect of a
higher barometric pressure in the Atlantic over the pressure resident
above the surface of the Pacific, a difference practically amounting to
a push upon the surface distensions of the Atlantic in the direction
of the Pacific, the very moment a _sensible_ union between them took
place. And it was a _sensible_ union. His comparison of it to a pinhole
was utterly misleading. Above a certain minimum, no matter what the
size of the major bodies of water were, relatively, connection between
them meant, under the circumstances, mixture, and a hole four hundred
miles wide was much above that minimum. At the very moment when he
penned this astute demonstration, the Gulf Stream had begun to throw
its seething waters across the sunken isthmus. And the effects followed
with startling rapidity. The author of the consoling reflections
quoted, perhaps had hardly had time to have forgotten the obsequious
reception his words received, when his admiring listeners were brought
face to face with the worst consequences he had considered absurdly
impossible.
The summer in Great Britain had been noticeably colder, and with the
passage of the autumnal equinox, the winds increased in strength,
and brought with them a terrifying cold. All records were broken, and
the sinking thermometers withdrawing their silver threads into the
diminutive bulbs, became suddenly the chief subjects of conversation.
The corridor of the Houses of Parliament, the state room of Windsor,
the clubs of Pall Mall and the parlors of the West End, no less than
the alcoves of London Bridge, the shops in White Friars, or the
auction stalls of the Ghetto, buzzed with the endless comparison of
observations made on these hitherto unnoticed instruments of precision,
and their slightest variations took precedence in the daily prints,
over the aphorisms of the prime minister or the nullities of the king.
An enormously increased sale of thermometers accompanied the sinister
records of the deepening cold; importations of them from the United
States spread an unprecedented wonder throughout the world as to the
meaning of this change in climate, and the range of temperature, as the
season advanced, was as much an object of solicitude as the growing
expenditures of London, and more talked about than the fancied rupture
between Spain and France. Meteorological journals were besieged with
subscribers; Abbe, Loomis, Ferrel were as much in demand at the book
stores as Glaisher or Thomson; Flammarion was as popular as Tyndal,
and the lectures delivered at the British Museum had such suffocating
success that the Red Cross Societies of London conceived the idea
of public instructions for a tuppenny, to replenish their forgotten
treasuries. The pedestrian and the chance acquaintance of the tramway
would interview each other on the prevalent topic of alarm, and quote
Wells, and Boussingault, and Daniel, and Quetelet, Forbes, Helmersen,
Kamtz and Kupffer with more unction and accuracy than he did the
current prices of wool or barley.
The fright began in the north, in Scotland. News first arrived from
the Hebrides, of desolating cold and overwhelming snow storms; then
the story was picked up by the Shetlands and Aberdeen, and then the
really tragic fate of Iceland was recounted. The cable between Scotland
and Iceland, completed in 1906, brought the tale. And a freezing
tale it was. Iceland had become a snow heap; its interior valleys
were filled up, from Heckla to Skaldbreid; from Skaldbreid to Esja
one portentous blanket of snow had levelled all inequalities of the
surface. The terror stricken inhabitants deserted their farms and
fought their way to Reykjavik, leaving all they possessed of sheep,
cattle and horses to be destroyed by the pitiless tooth of the Ice
King. Reykjavik had been deserted; its people fleeing to ships and
steamers as the remorseless winds piled up the white shrouds of its
Arctic burial. The cable summoned assistance for those yet fighting for
life on the water’s edge, where the sea air helped them to maintain a
margin of cleared ground. Over ten feet had accumulated, and ceaseless
blizzards, unchecked, and even increasing in fury, with a tireless and
killing cold, had renewed the ice age within that boreal republic. The
panic spread. From confidence and scorn the people of Scotland and
England and Ireland plunged into the clamor of despair and maniacal
forebodings. Religious fraternities of “Frigidists” were organized,
whose exegesis made the prophecy of the End of the World a menace
of destruction by ice. Geikie’s _Ice Age_, and Croll’s _Climate and
Time_ were read by earl and bellboy, and in the midst of the general
consternation, the publishers of these books, in cheap form, doubled
their business capacity and their fortunes.
Then came the sudden visitation of Edinburgh, with the scenes just
recounted. The transference of these immense swarms of people, the
evicted tenants of the north (poor creatures who had never owned
the land they lived on except by the sufferance of some landlord
duke or “gentleman,”) southward, was a task of difficulty. Sir
John C--, was provost marshal of the city at the time (his father
before him had held the same office), and had devised a scheme of
goodly proportions and efficacy. He appointed wardens, who, with
assistants selected by themselves, visited the families in the several
bailiwicks in Edinburgh, and prepared them for the departure, and
who also apportioned to the different wards of the town the streaming
populations from all the neighboring villages, towns and the country
sides. The railroads were seized by the government, and systematic
transportation, begun and carried on night and day. They were taken
to the larger seaports of England, and of course to London. Already
secret misgivings that chilled the marrow of their bones, and made the
blood circling in their hearts freeze with horror, were entertained
by public men, that perchance this was not all, nor indeed the worst.
Was the power of the Kingdom of Great Britain to be made the jest of
the snowflake and the ice-cicle? The thought made reason totter, but
new gleams of anticipation seemed suddenly to place upon that very
thought the consecration of joy. They should be driven from their
hearthstone to bring the English culture in other English lands, and
emancipated men--men of the new type, like H. G. Wells--said that that
culture, torn from the swaddling bands of a conventional tradition,
the silly materialism of forms and dresses, of titles and classes, of
imperialistic gew-gaws, and the impediments of habit, would expand
into a modern civilization, which, carrying forward all the strains
of strength, and imaginative and ideal aims, it had before, might
incorporate in them the new procreative life of a liberal social state.
Well! there was some consolation in that, but a consolation robbed of
much positive consistency when all around them they saw the loss of
trade, the paralysis of hope, the desertion of homes, and the rising
threats of that inexorable and deaf deity--Nature.
Leacraft had watched and waited. Every new development, each changing
report, the wearily studied logs of the ships and steamers, the
daily averages of temperature and rainfall, the swelling disorder in
the climate of the United States, and confirmed rumors of the hot
current--which might be the Gulf Stream--pouring, pouring northward,
and hugging the shores of California and Washington and Oregon, and
even repelling the cold from Alaska, supplying a stove to its shores,
which, it was promptly surmised, would make of it a northern paradise,
all, in a cumulative way, pointed to one result--the evacuation of
England. His speculative mind hurried on to the picturing of the
changed aspects of the national life, and he felt that for once
Science, embodied in the laws of Nature, was about to put to flight the
mentality of men, and pour the vials of its confusion over the proud,
the boasting defiance of their thin optimism. And yet--what might not
Opportunity perform? Perhaps the old receptacles of civilization needed
emptying; their garnered seeds to be more quickly cast upon the winds
of chance to germinate and flower again in the waste places of the
world. And Leacraft hurried to and fro--a small inherited competency
had dissolved his business bonds--a lonely, sad man, excited by the
thoughts of the world’s trembling position on a new threshold of
events, and thus forgetting the gnawing pains of his own disappointment.
During September he had been at the far north of Scotland, and
retreated day by day with the invading cold, fleeing with its fleeing
people, southward. On the memorable evening whose events have been
rehearsed, he had found Edinburgh practically voided, and left to its
entombment. The work of getting the people away, of convincing the
incredulous, of providing for the needy, of deporting the treasures
of this great depository, had been hastily and imperfectly done. In
spite of Sir John C--’s useful plans, it could not be different.
Disorder, recriminations, riot and clashes were inevitable at a moment
of such sudden penetrating terror. Blocks after blocks of private
homes remained with little or nothing of their rich contents removed.
This condition was understood, and predatory bands of desperate men
broke into them, encamped in them and defied expulsion. They laughed
at warnings, and after filling their improvised camps with coal and
stores, prepared with exultation to enjoy this novel debauch. Furniture
and household effects had been dumped or deserted in the streets, and
almost any extemporaneous digging in the drifts would uncover books,
clothing and utensils. A grotesque hogarthian aspect had been produced
by the retreat of the cats to the houses, and their mingled swarms at
windows and on sills, whither they were strangely followed by hordes of
mice and rats, expelled from the country and filtering into the city
in scampering lines before the weather had reached the height of its
tempestuous inclemency.
The documentary archives of the city had been locked up in great safes
and left for more propitious days--in summer? This example had been
imitated in thousands of the better class houses, as the professional,
the _official_ opinion, still hesitated to contemplate the monstrous
alternative of a permanent sepulture of their beautiful home.
One thing had been accomplished, and it was well done. The people,
those who would leave, had been gotten away. When on the tenth of
September the first storm of snow began, and the mercury sunk to
a few degrees below zero Fah., the suffering became intense. Soon
the railroads were blocked. Enlightened opinion had received its
instructions. The return of Scotland to the bondage of snow and ice was
published, and the publications carried conviction to a great many.
The loss of the Gulf Stream was at length acknowledged. The impetus
of the discovery made the worst prophecies credible. The intensity of
this acquiescence was astounding. It became a matter of faith that the
population should vacate their own city, and they obeyed instructions
unanimously with a touching self-surrender to fate. Great numbers
left Leith by boats and steamers summoned from London. The railroads
responded with promptitude, though, by reason of a sudden access of
energy in the government, nothing less would have been tolerated,
longer than was necessary to confiscate their property and franchises.
The phenomenal desertion of the city by three hundred thousand souls
seemed as fore-ordained, as obligatory in the regime of events, as the
setting of the sun, or the return of the seasons.
But no activity of all the available means of transportation would
have sufficed to take a population of more than three hundred thousand
men and women in less than two months away from the city, unless it
had been supplemented by other means. And a strange and most effective
movement accomplished completely what more recondite or artificial
methods would have failed to secure. The “Frigidists,” the group of
fanatical preachers and their followers, who found in the present
calamity an opportunity for a religious propaganda, or, through the
fermentation and clouded expectations of their own zeal, believed it to
be the expression of a supernatural agency, had begun a street crusade
(always in Edinburgh popular and familiar) to accomplish the removal
of the people. These singular fanatics served a most benevolent end,
and their strange hallucinations wisely aided the anxious efforts of
the authorities. They arrayed themselves in white, and went bareheaded
through the streets of the city, exhorting all who would listen to
accept their interpretations of the approaching judgment. They wove
their texts of prophecy with denunciations of sin, and with the
crowding evidences of some astounding climatic change, repeated with
accelerated eagerness in paper, pulpit and forum, they acquired a
tyrannous control over the emotions of the populace.
Then they quickly, and with excellent discernment, organized the
people into small regiments, distributed to them white cockades and
white rosettes and marched them out of the city, southward, over
the frozen and snow-lined roads. This evacuation began scarcely
soon enough for the best results. But it gave relief. These moving
companies, accompanied with vans and horse carts, and vehicles of every
description, gathering numbers along their way, grew in picturesque
confusion, as flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were united to them,
or the miners from the coal pits, and the artisans from the factories
joined in the vast, singing army.
Like the inexorable morality of the French mobs in the French
Revolution, who scornfully resisted the temptations of their
own hunger in a fierce zeal to protect private property, so an
overmastering enthusiasm permeated those rough Scottish nomads, and
they marched through the country rigorously just and honest. There
was suffering and death among them, and nothing could have been
more sublimely pathetic than the improvised services of burial that
were held from time to time along the roads they crossed. Those who
heard its vibrant and powerful melody will remember the eclipsing
magnificence of the hymn, sung to the air of _Adestes Fideles_, which
began with the words:
“Firm, faithful and tried,
With endless glory crowned.”
The success of these “Frigidists” was phenomenal, but it also clearly
arose from the awful portents of change which made the stoutest men
quail, and not inaptly tested the scepticism of the boldest scoffers.
The revolution in Nature had not only affected Scotland; its dire
effects were felt in the whole of the Scandinavian area, and the
more southern parts of Europe, which had owed some measure of their
favorable winters to the direct or intermediate influence of the Gulf
Stream, were now made to feel their sudden penury in its removal.
A frightful stagnation invaded the European markets; a panic of doubt
spread confusion everywhere, and those who controlled the sources of
money, very soon checked its use in the avenues of trade, while of
necessity speculation and the desire for speculation simultaneously
vanished.
It was the last train intending to leave Edinburgh that, on November
28th, waited for the Provost Marshal, and the little army of workers,
and which Leacraft also expected to take. The tracks southward had
been patrolled by trains of cars or locomotives for every five miles,
and these had kept the way cleared, while they reinforced each other
at critical junctures. When this last connection between the muffled
city and the south should be broken, then practically Scotland
returned, over the sweep of sixty thousand years, to a geological phase
_resembling_ that which Geikie, Scotland’s own great historian of
nature, had described in these words: “All northern Europe and northern
America disappeared beneath a thick crust of ice and snow, and the
glaciers of such regions as Switzerland assumed gigantic proportions.
This great sheet of land-ice levelled up the valleys of Britain, and
stretched across our mountains and hills, down to the low latitudes
of England, being only one connected or confluent series of mighty
glaciers, the ice crept ever downwards, and onwards from the mountains,
following the direction of the principal valleys, and pushing far out
to sea, where it terminated at last in deep water, many miles away from
what now forms the coast-line of our country. This sea of ice was of
such extent that the glaciers of Scandinavia coalesced with those of
Scotland, upon what is now the floor of the shallow North Sea, while
a mighty stream of ice flowing outwards from the western seaboard
obliterated the Hebrides, and sent its icebergs adrift in the deep
waters of the Atlantic.”