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Oh, rot!" said Senior. "I can't quite remember such a crawl as this, Jack; listen how the engine coughs." "If we can't get to the top of the incline what then?" asked Grim. "Go back, I should say." "To Lowbay?" "Yes. But while we do crawl there's no need to fret." "That would mean goodbye for the present to your place, old man?" "Yes. 'Twould be a horrid nuisance, wouldn't it?"
"Raven Crag," the name of Acton's home, was situated just within the borders of Yorkshire. A single line of rails takes you from Lowbay Junction up the Westmoreland hills to the top of the heaviest gradient in the kingdom, and then hurtles you down into the little wayside station of Lansdale, the station for "Raven Crag."
Looking up and down the line, they could see their train surrounded by its dazzling environment, and the drifts were so high that they had filled the low cutting stretching towards Lowbay level to its top. The train was an island in a sea of snow.
To go back to Lowbay, or forward to Lansdale, was plainly impossible, and neither guard nor driver thought they could be ploughed out under two days at the earliest. "And yet," concluded Acton, "we can't starve and freeze for two days. Look here, guard, isn't there a fell farm somewhere hereabouts? I begin to fancy " "There's one over the hills yonder, three or four miles away.
Thus it was that, tired but jolly, the party of five Amorians got out of the main line express at Lowbay, and, each laden with rugs and magazines, stumbled light-heartedly across the snow-sodden platform into the local train, which had waited for the express nearly three hours. They found themselves sixteen miles from home, and with no prospect of reaching it before midnight.
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