Dark moments in miracle of survival

The first night was the worst, Roy Harley recalls of 10 weeks that survivors of a plane crash 50 years ago clung to life on an Andean glacier.

Of the plane's 45 occupants, 16 made it home from a 72-day ordeal known as the "Miracle of the Andes" that included eating flesh of the dead. But for Harley, now 70, that was not the worst of the nightmare made famous by the 1993 film Alive.

After the initial shock of their plane crashing into the Andes on Friday the 13th of October, 1972, Harley and 31 others found themselves in pitch dark in minus 30 degrees Celsius at an altitude of 3,500 meters.

Many of them not yet 20 - the plane was flying an amateur Uruguayan rugby team and family members to a match in Santiago, Chile - none were dressed for the cold. And several were badly injured.

Those who could squeezed into what remained of the fuselage between dead bodies and the injured.

"That night I experienced hell," Harley recalls. "At my feet was a boy who was missing a part of his face and choking on blood. I didn't have the courage to hold his hand, to comfort him. I was afraid. I was very afraid."

By morning, four more were dead, and so started a torment that would whittle the number of survivors to 16.

There were many dark moments.

"I don't have words to describe how cold it was," says Harley's former teammate, fellow survivor and friend Carlos Paez, 68. "It was so difficult that I have no words to describe it."

Many times they thought it was the end.

On Day 10, the survivors heard on the plane radio that the search for them had been called off.

"One of the most painful things was to realize the world was going on without us," says Paez, who today travels the world as a motivational speaker.

But it was also the jolt the survivors needed to try to find a way off the glacier.

Another tribulation was having to broach the topic of anthropophagy - eating human flesh.

There was barely any food on the plane and no sustenance on the ice-covered landscape. Soon the survivors were starving, and majority voted to eat their dead friends. "We had tried to eat leather, we tried to eat cigarettes, we tried to eat toothpaste," Harley recalls at Paez's home in Montevideo. "When you have the choice to die or to use the only thing you have ... we did what we did to live."

On Day 16 disaster struck yet again. An avalanche buried the mangled fuselage as the survivors slept.

Eight were killed, leaving 19 of the original 32 crash survivors. Three more would die in the coming days.

Displaying incredible ingenuity and tenacity, the survivors used plane debris to fashion bonnets, mittens, snow shoes, quilts and dark glasses against snow blindness. They found a way to melt ice and snow for drinking water in sub-zero temperatures.

And help did arrive after survivors Roberto Canessa and Fernando Parrado walked for 10 days into the hostile terrain, guided by instinct. Finally, they came to a river and spotted men on horseback on the other side.

Over the noise of the water they could not make themselves heard, but next day one of the men was back with a piece of paper wrapped around a stone he threw to the pair.

On it, Parrado wrote a plea for help that started with "I come from a plane that fell in the mountains."

The next day, the first helicopters came.

When he had boarded the ill-fated Uruguay Air Force plane for Chile, Harley weighed 84 kilograms. By the time he was rescued he had 37 kg on his 1.8-meter frame.

"An extraordinary story starring ordinary people," says Paez.