The only way to survive was to eat the flesh of the dead. But for Harley, a retired engineer now aged 70, that was not the worst of the nightmare made famous by the 1993 film 'Alive.'
CANELONES, URUGUAY - The first night was the worst, Roy Harley recalls of the ten weeks he and other survivors of a plane crash 50 years ago managed to cling to life on an Andean glacier without food or shelter, and very little reason for hope.
After the initial shock of their plane crashing into the Andes mountains on that fateful Friday the 13th of October 1972, Harley and 31 other survivors found themselves in the pitch dark in minus 30 degrees Celsius at an altitude of some 3,500 meters. By morning, four more were dead, and so started a seemingly relentless torment that would eventually whittle the number of survivors down to 16."I don't have words to describe how cold it was," said Harley's former rugby teammate, fellow survivor and friend Carlos Paez, 68. "We were so cold, it was so difficult, that I have no words to describe it."On Day 10, the survivors heard on the plane radio that the search for them had been called off.
There was no sustenance to be found anywhere in the desolate, ice-covered landscape, and soon the survivors were starving."We had tried to eat leather, we tried to eat cigarettes, we tried to eat toothpaste," Harley recalled at Paez's home in Montevideo.