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.