Searching For- Society | Of The Snow In-all Categ...

That night, the silence inside the fuselage was deeper than the snow outside. Someone began to cry. Then another. Then all of them—because crying was the only thing left. But tears freeze at 20 below. They learned that quickly.

After that, they moved to the rear of the plane—the tail section, still intact. There, they found a miracle: a small transistor radio. And on that radio, they heard the news: "The search for Flight 571 has ended. No survivors."

Every year, on October 13, they meet. They eat together. They laugh. They remember the 29 who did not come home. And Roberto Canessa, now a cardiologist, often ends the toast the same way: Searching for- Society of the snow in-All Categ...

Roberto Canessa, the medical student, was the first to speak the unthinkable. "There is meat out there. It's human. But it's protein. It's life."

Helicopters came. Two of them, Chilean Air Force. The first pilot, seeing the wreckage and the emaciated survivors waving from the snow, whispered into his radio: "I see dead men. But they are moving." That night, the silence inside the fuselage was

Of the 45 people on board, 12 died instantly or within hours. The survivors—29 of them—huddled in the broken shell of the plane, which had slid to a stop on a glacier at 3,570 meters (11,700 feet). The cold was a living thing, a predator with teeth of frost.

The world had declared them dead.

They cut slivers of frozen flesh with a shard of glass. They held their noses. They swallowed. And they did not die of hunger.