THE ULTIMATE TABOO

IT’S a story that still haunts the world: the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes forced to eat the bodies of their dead friends in order to survive. Now one of those who made it through has written a haunting and deeply moving book. On Saturday, in our first enthralling extract, he told of the 1972 crash and the hunger that drove him to break the ultimate taboo. Today, he describes the incredible journey he made to find help — and to complete one final challenge . . .

BEHIND us, the fuselage grew smaller and smaller in the distance. Our friends watched from the wreckage of the plane as the two of us began climbing the mountain wall. I turned round occasionally to look at them until they were shadowy pinpricks, tiny black ants moving along a snowy white canvas.

No wonder the rescue planes hadn’t seen us. With the white fuselage camouflaged against the snow, we were totally invisible. Finally, I could no longer see our friends, and I felt a rush of anxiety as the umbilical cord that kept us attached to them was severed.

There were only 16 of us left now, out of the original 45 who’d been on board when the plane plunged out of the sky two months before. Would we ever see them again? I doubted it.

We’d said goodbye with the first rays of dawn as we set out on our life-or-death mission. We wore several jumpers and pairs of trousers. We’d lost so much weight that we could easily wear them all at once.

On my back was a makeshift sleeping bag constructed from the insulation fibres in the plane’s tailpiece. I also carried a rugby sock stuffed with our food: strips of frozen human flesh we’d cut, amid much torment and soul-searching, from the bodies of our friends who’d died.

My friend Nando and I walked in our rugby boots, using cushions from the plane as snowshoes, and we each carried a length of rope and a metal stick. In truth, we had no idea what we needed. Neither of us had any climbing experience whatsoever.

The mountain wall was nearly vertical, and the air was so thin that every few yards we found ourselves gasping for breath. As night swiftly devoured twilight, we could suddenly see nothing ahead. We didn’t know whether we were stepping on to firm ground or about to fall into a ravine.

‘What am I doing here?’ I shouted. ‘Where in god’s name am I?’

Our sweat-soaked clothes began to freeze as the temperature plummeted. The wind seemed bent on whipping us into oblivion. It looked as though we were going to die on our first night away from the plane.

But as always happens to me, despair made me fight harder. To stumble into a canyon was preferable to giving up and awaiting a frozen death.

At last, when all seemed lost, we came across a clear, windswept area beneath a stony outcrop near the edge of an abyss, where we could lie down and wait out the terrible night.

One false move could send us over the edge. But if the two of us huddled together and lay very still, we hoped against hope that we might just survive till morning.

By the third day, Nando and I were approaching the summit. Only then would we be able to look around us and assess the challenge that lay ahead.

How often we’d visualised in our minds’ eye the verdant valleys that we fondly believed lay on the other side of the mountain: quaint villages, happy herdsmen, abundant food.

It was Nando who got there first. ‘What can you see?’ I asked, as I clambered to join him.

He was staring silently into the distance. As I joined him, I could see why. Before us lay an infinite number of gigantic snowy peaks disappearing to the horizon.

East, west, north, south, there was nothing but ice and snow and mountains. We’re dead, I thought. My despair was absolute.

Then Nando pointed. I followed the direction of his finger to the west, in the direction of Chile.

There, hardly visible to the naked eye, were twin peaks that appeared not to be covered with snow. They were incredibly far away. But they were our only hope.

‘Can you imagine how beautiful all this would be if we weren’t doomed?’ said Nando.

That night, we huddled together in our improvised sleeping bag, not just for warmth, but to fight back the terror of the unknown. We both knew we were likely to die. But we’d give death a run for its money first.

The next morning, little by little, we began our descent. During some stretches we slid down the mountain nearly sitting down; at other times, we clung face-first to the cliff, careful not to let our backpacks tip us back. We watched out for each other, always on the alert.

By nightfall we were exhausted and battered. My outer jeans were worn through with holes; it was as well I had two more pairs on. Every part of my stone-ground body was in agony.

THE only way I got through those first days away from the plane was by setting myself short-term goals. It could be nothing more than reaching that next boulder, that next cliff, that next rock formation. There were so many possible ways to die, it was better to focus on the remote possibility that we’d survive. Keep your head down. Keep walking.

Sometimes I thought I heard a plane. Nando swore he didn’t. Only later would we find out that an aircraft chartered by our parents had, indeed, been out looking for us, scouring the mountainsides.

On day seven we began withdrawing into ourselves. Our minds and bodies were starting to fail. My skin had taken on a greenish tinge, and my toes were turning black from hypothermia.

I dreamed of my girlfriend Lauri in Montevideo. She would have to find another boyfriend. But how would my mother move on?

The night before, just before falling asleep, Nando and I had told each other in whispers about all the hopes for the future we’d had in our other life. I was never as close to any friend as I was to Nando during our trek — and nor would I ever be. LIFE in the mountains had its own rhythm, its own routine, its own set of savage rules, and we became part of it. For us, the day ended at 4pm when the sun disappeared behind the western mountains.

But on that seventh day, as the temperature dropped and we set up our camp, something felt different. I looked at my watch. It was 4.15 pm and the sun was still shining.

A few minutes later I checked again. It had been more than 30 minutes since the sun should have disappeared behind the mountains, just as it always had. But not tonight.

‘Nando, how is the sun still lighting up the valley?’ We looked upwards.

‘If the sun isn’t being blocked, that must mean we’re almost out of the mountains!’ I shouted. ‘Over there, where the sun is still shining through — that’s the way out!’

That night, total darkness did not fall until until 7.12 pm.

WAKING the following morning from a restless sleep, I realised that while my body was still exhausted, my mind felt clearer. ‘There’s far more oxygen here,’ I said to Nando in surprise.

Travelling further downwards that day, the snow began giving way to rocky terrain and loose gravel. Then, finally, miraculously, it disappeared.

The only white we could see now was up high in the distance. The place where we stood was arid and desolate, where probably no man had ever set foot before. But to me, it felt like the gates of paradise.

An hour later, the most wonderful thing of all: six feet ahead of me I saw a lizard, staring right at me. I was entranced, mesmerised. The origins of life were beginning to emerge in their most primitive forms.

That night, we found the first twigs we had seen for months and lit a fire with a lighter we’d carried in our backpack. We laid out the sleeping bag not over ice, but on a pillowy cushion of vegetation. It was the first time since October 13 that we’d not slept at the mercy of the mountain.

The next day the signs of civilisation began to multiply. A horseshoe. A rusty tin can. A stream that became a rushing river. A clump of trees, and next to them two cows.

Later, we saw trees felled by axes. Boot prints were all around.

‘We’re going to make it, aren’t we?’ Nando said at last, with an expression resembling a smile — something I hadn’t seen on his face for many weeks. We had arrived in civilisation.

Nando had the idea of climbing a tree and dropping a rock on the head of one the cattle so we could eat. I said it would be better to slit their tendons, like the early cowboys did.

In the middle of this absurd conversation I looked over Nando’s shoulder. There, on the other side of the river, was the silhouette of a man in a hat riding a horse.

We started yelling, but our screams were drowned out by the roaring river, that was far too dangerous to cross.

The rider took a few more steps, then stopped and looked round.

I watched as Nando jumped up and down, shouting ‘Plane!’ and flapping his arms up and down before dropping to his knees and folding his hands in desperate supplication.