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.