A loud sound of galloping was audible and men yelled in the distance. The breezy, cold wind stung Tom and Joe's faces and made their noses red. Around the peak was just whiteness, full of snow falling from a dark sky. It was chilled to the bone as they were exposed at hundreds of feet high in the air. The howling of the wind repeated loudly like a raging alarm in the passengers' ears. The rummaging of long trudging steps was heard in the snow just a few metres below, and Tom and Joe's hearts were beating faster than ever.
The faint sound grew louder and louder and then after one last trudge, it stopped. Tom whispered quietly to Joe, "what's happening?"
"I am going to light the other lamps, okay?"
"Beware!" His snowy gloves trembled as he slowly lit the wooden candle sticks.
The place was bright and at first, a horse's face was visible to the eye, emerging from the falling snow.
Then, four men carrying rifles emerged from the back and they all looked like they were ready to fight. "Give us your goods!" one man demanded. Without response, Joe raised his gun...
PASSAGE (from A Tale of Two Cities)
In this passage, the writer describes England in 1775 - a lawless time of thieves and highway men (robbers who stole from travellers). The Dover Mail was the equivalent of the Royal Mail-a horse-drawn coach delivering the post.
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, after which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green by one highwayman, who despoiled him in sight of all his retinue; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way.
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter's Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbade that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty. With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with
robbers; they all suspected everybody else.
"Wo-ho!" said the coachman. "Joel"
"Halloa!" the guard replied.
"What o'clock do you make it, Joe?"
"Ten minutes, good, past eleven."
"My blood!" ejaculated the vexed coachman, "and not atop of Shooter's yet! Tst! Yah! Get on
with you!"
The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses stopped to breathe again,
and the guard got down to skid the wheel for the descent, and open the coach-door to let the
passengers in.
"Tst! Joe!" cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his box
"What do you say, Tom?"
They both listened.
"I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe."
"I say a horse at a gallop, Tom, "returned the guard, leaving his hold of the door, and mounting
nimbly to his place. "Gentlemen! In the king's name, all of you!"
With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on the offensive.
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