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seats in the front half facing aft, those to the rear facing forward. More than that, I had expected to see people, injured, broken and moaning people, flung all over the seats and aisles: but the big passenger compartment seemed almost empty, and there wasn't a sound to be heard. 
         
         But it wasn't empty, not quite. Apart from the man by my side there were, I found, nine others altogether. Two men lay in the front part of the aisle. One, a big broad-shouldered man with curly dark hair, was propped up on an elbow, staring around him with a puzzled frown on his face; near him, lying on his side, was a smaller, much older man, but all I could see of him were a few wisps of black hair plastered across a bald head, a Glenurquhart plaid jacket that seemed a couple of sizes too big for him and the loudest check tie it had ever been my misfortune to see. It seemed obvious that they had been sitting together in the left-hand seat adjacent to them and had been flung out when the plane crashed into the ice-mound and slewed violently to one side. 
         
         In the seat beyond that, also on the left, a man sat by himself. My first reaction was surprise that he, too, hadn't been hurled into the aisle, but then I saw that he was awake and fully conscious. He was sitting rigidly in his seat, pressed in hard against the window, legs braced on the floor, holding on with both hands to the table fixed to the seat in front: tautened tendons ridged the backs of his thin white hands, and his knuckles gleamed in the torch-light. I lifted the beam higher, saw that he was wearing a close-fitting clerical collar. 
         
         "Relax, Reverend," I said soothingly. "Terra firma once more, and this is as far as you are going." He said nothing, just stared at me through rimless glasses, so I left him. He seemed unhurt. 
         
         Four people sat in the right-hand side of the front part of the plane, each one in a window seat; two women, two men. One of the women was fairly elderly, but so heavily made-up and with her hair so expensively dyed and marcelled that I couldn't have guessed her age within ten years: her face, somehow, seemed vaguely familiar. She was awake, and looking slowly about her, her eyes empty of understanding. So, too, was the woman in the next seat, an even more expensive-looking creature with a mink coat flung cape-wise over her shoulders to show a simple green jersey dress that I suspected cost a small fortune: she was about twenty-five, I guessed, and with her blonde hair, grey eyes and perfect features would have been one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, if it weren't for the overfull and rather sulky mouth. Maybe, I thought uncharitably, she remembered to do something about that mouth when she was fully awake. But right then, she wasn't fully awake: none of them was, they all behaved as if they were being dragged up from the depths of an exhausting sleep. 
         
         Still more asleep than awake were the other two men in the front, one a big, burly, high-coloured man of about fifty-five, with the gleaming thick white hair and moustache of the caricature of a Dixie colonel: the other was a thin elderly man, his face heavily lined, unmistakably Jewish. 
         
         Not bad going so far, I thought with relief. Eight people, and only one cut forehead among the lot of them - the perfect argument, if ever there was one, for having all seats in a plane face towards the rear. No question but that they all owed, if not their lives, at least their immunity to injury to the fact that their high-backed seats had almost completely cushioned and absorbed the shock of impact. 
         
         The two passengers in the rear end of the cabin were the perfect argument for not having the seat face forward. The first I came to - a brown-haired young girl of about eighteen or nineteen, wearing a belted raincoat - was lying on the floor between two seats.