‘You’ve got a ski pole through your thigh,’ he said eventually.

‘What?’

‘You’ve got a ski pole right through your thigh.’

He shook his head in fascination.

‘The loop snapped off when it hit you and caught on your trousers, but the pole itself…’

His head vanished from my field of vision.

‘It’s sticking out about twenty centimetres on the other side,’ he called out. ‘You’ve bled a bit. Well, quite a lot, actually. Are you cold? I mean, are you colder than… It looks as if the pole is slightly bent, so…’

‘We can’t pull it out,’ said the man with the yellow goggles around his neck, so quietly that I only just heard him. ‘She’d bleed to death. Who’s been stupid enough to put a pair of poles in here?’

He looked around accusingly.

‘We need to get her out of here right now, Johan. But what the hell are we going to do with the pole?’

I don’t really remember anything else.

And so of the 269 people on board train number 601 from Oslo to Bergen on Wednesday 14 February 2007, only one person lost his life in the crash. He was driving the train, and can hardly have grasped what was happening before he died. Incidentally, we didn’t crash into the mountain itself. At the foot of Finsenut, a concrete pipe has been sunk into the rock, as if someone thought that the ten-kilometre tunnel wasn’t long enough as it was, and therefore needed to be supplemented with several metres of ugly concrete in the otherwise beautiful landscape around the lake known as Finsevann. Subsequent investigations would show that the actual derailment occurred exactly ten metres from the opening. The cause was the fact that the rails had acquired a comprehensive covering of ice. Many people have tried to explain to me how such a thing could happen.