Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

The Uruguayans ate beef as the Irish ate potatoes,

All the same, they worried about the crossing, because the Andes, though less than a hundred miles wide, rise to an average height of 13,000 feet, with peaks as high as 20,000 feet; one mountain, Aconcagua, which lies between Mendoza and Santiago, rises to 22,834 feet, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere and only about 6,000 feet short of Mount Everest.

had crashed not just in the mountains but in a desert, too.

Their only difficulty was in finding uncontaminated snow, for around the plane it was pink from the blood of the dead and wounded, and polluted by oil from the plane and by urine.

You can’t climb mountains on a little piece of chocolate and a sip of wine.’ ‘Then I’ll cut meat from one of the pilots,’ said Parrado.

‘I was so sure it would be found,’ she said, ‘that I told her it had been found already.’

For some days several of the boys had realized that if they were to survive they would have to eat the bodies of those who had died in the crash. It was a ghastly prospect. The corpses lay around the plane in the snow, preserved by the intense cold in the state in which they had died. While the thought of cutting flesh from those who had been their friends was deeply repugnant to them all, a lucid appreciation of their predicament led them to consider it.

All that is left here are the carcasses, which are no more human beings than the dead flesh of the cattle we eat at home.’

I know,’ Zerbino went on, ‘that if my dead body could help you to stay alive, then I’d certainly want you to use it. In fact, if I do die and you don’t eat me, then I’ll come back from wherever I am and give you a good kick in the ass.’

He felt triumphant. His conscience had overcome a primitive, irrational taboo. He was going to survive.

that this day would never come, but it has and we have to face it with courage and faith.

we’re going to get out of here on our own.’

It’s like Holy Communion. When Christ died he gave his body to us so that we could have spiritual life. My friend has given us his body so that we can have physical life.’

what they missed now showed them what they had had.

The villagers considered him a wizard because he carried with him a Polaroid camera and would give gifts of their images to men who had never seen a photograph before.

perhaps it would be better to die than to survive alone, isolated in the Andes.

‘We have survived the worst,’ he said. ‘From now on, things can only get better.’

what he had been willing to do for the sake of all, he was unwilling to do for himself.

It would have been possible now to avoid eating such things as rotten lungs and putrid intestines of bodies they had cut up weeks before, but half the boys continued to do so because they had come to need the stronger taste. It had taken a supreme effort of will for these boys to eat human flesh at all, but once they had started and persevered, appetite had come with the eating, for the instinct to survive was a harsh tyrant which demanded not just that they eat their companions but that they get used to doing so.

It was still more difficult for him and for the others to eat what was recognizably human – a hand, say, or a foot – but they did so all the same.

‘You can make it tough, God,’ he prayed, ‘but don’t make it impossible.’

He turned his head and saw a daisy growing by his nose. He picked it, sniffed it, and then handed it to Carlitos, who lay beside him. Carlitos took it from him and was about to smell it too, but instead he crammed it into his mouth and ate it.

How could she be surprised that they ate the dead when it was such a normal and obvious thing to do?

‘No, thanks,’ said Zerbino, ‘I prefer my own.’

never for a moment had they lost their faith in Him; never had they doubted His love or His approval of their desperate and ugly struggle to survive.

love, but it had taught him that the love of God was not something to count on for survival.

If anything, the experience had made him less religious; he now had a stronger belief in man.

Each day that passed had peeled off layer upon layer of superficiality until they were left only with what they truly cared for: their families, their novias, their faith in God and their homeland. They now despised the world of fashionable clothes, nightclubs, flirtatious girls, and idle living. They determined to take their work more seriously, to be more devout

in their religious observances, and to dedicate more time to their families.

resort to courageous decisions. Now that I have confirmation of what has happened I repeat: Thank God that the forty-five were there, for sixteen homes have regained their children.’

Only five miles to the east of the Fairchild there was a hotel

They felt that the faith and friendship which inspired them in the cordillera do not emerge from these pages.