I was in a caravan-truck, much like the truck that had carried me over the Kargav to Rer, but in the van; not the cab. There were twenty or thirty other people in with me, hard to tell how many, since there were no windows and light came only through a slit in the rear door, screened with four thicknesses of steel mesh. We had evidently been traveling some while when I recovered conscious thought, as each person's place was more or less defined, and the smell of excreta, vomit, and sweat had already reached a point it neither surpassed nor declined from. No one knew any of the others. No one knew where we were being taken. There was little talking. It was the second time I had been locked in the dark with uncomplaining, unhopeful people of Orgoreyn. I knew now the sign I had been given, my first night in this country. I had ignored that black cellar and gone looking for the substance of Orgoreyn above ground, in daylight. No wonder nothing had seemed real.

I felt that the truck was going east, and couldn't get rid of this impression even when it became plain that it was going west, farther and farther into Orgoreyn. One's magnetic and directional subsenses are all wrong on other planets; when the intellect won't or can't compensate for that wrongness, the result is a profound bewilderment, a feeling that everything, literally, has come loose.

One of the truckload died that night. He had been clubbed or kicked in the abdomen, and died hemorrhaging from anus and mouth. No one did anything for him; there was nothing to be done. A plastic jug of water had been shoved in amongst us some hours before, but it was long since dry. The man happened to be next to me on the right, and I took his head on my knees to give him relief in breathing; so he died. We were all naked, but thereafter I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it.

The night grew bitter, and we had to get close together for warmth. The corpse, having nothing to give, was pushed out of the group, excluded. The rest of us huddled together, swaying and jolting all in one motion, all night. Darkness was total inside our steel box. We were on some country road, and no truck followed us; even with face pressed up close to the mesh one could see nothing out the door-slit but darkness and the vague loom of fallen snow.

Falling snow; new-fallen snow; long-fallen snow; snow after rain has fallen on it; refrozen snow… Orgota and Karhidish have a word for each of these. In Karhidish (which I know better than Orgota) they have by my count sixty-two words for the various kinds, states, ages, and qualities of snow; fallen snow, that is. There is another set of words for the varieties of snowfall; another for ice; a set of twenty or more that define what the temperature range is, how strong a wind blows, and what kind of precipitation is occurring, all together. I sat and tried to draw up lists of these words in my head that night. Each time I recalled another one I would repeat the lists, inserting it in its alphabetical place.

Along after dawn the truck stopped. People screamed out the slit .that there was a dead body in the truck: come and take it out. One after another of us screamed and shouted. We pounded together on the sides and door, making so hideous a pandemonium inside the steel box that we could not stand it ourselves. No one came. The truck stood still for some hours. At last there was a sound of voices outside; the truck lurched, skidding on an ice-patch, and set off again. One could see through the slit that it was late on a sunny morning, and that we were going through wooded hills.

The truck continued thus for three more days and nights—four in all since my awakening. It made no stops at Inspection Points, and I think it never passed through a town of any size. Its journey was erratic, furtive. There were stops to change drivers and recharge batteries; there were other, longer stops for no reason that could be discerned from inside the van. Two of the days it sat still from noon till dark, as if deserted, then began its run again at night. Once a day, around noon, a big jug of water was passed in through a trap in the door.

Counting the corpse there were twenty-six of us, two thirteens. Gethenians often think in thirteens, twenty-sixes, fifty-twos, no doubt because of the 26-day lunar cycle that makes their unvarying month and approximates their sexual cycle. The corpse was shoved up tight against the steel doors that formed the rear wall of our box, where he would keep cold. The rest of us sat and lay and crouched, each in his own place, his territory, his Domain, until night; when the cold grew so extreme that little by little we drew together and merged into one entity occupying one space, warm in the middle, cold at the periphery.

There was kindness. I and certain others, an old man and one with a bad cough, were recognized as being least resistant to the cold, and each night we were at the center of the group, the entity of twenty-five, where it was warmest. We did not struggle for the warm place, we simply were in it each night. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.

Despite our crowdedness and our huddling together nights, we in the truck were remote from one another. Some were stupefied from drugging, some were probably mental or social defectives to start with, all were abused and scared; yet it may be strange that among twenty-five not one ever spoke to all the others together, not even to curse them. Kindness there was and endurance, but in silence, always in silence. Jammed together in the sour darkness of our shared mortality, we bumped one another continually, jolted together, fell over one another, breathed our breaths mingling, laid the heat of our bodies together as a fire is laid—but remained strangers. I never learned the name of any of them in the truck.

One day, the third day I think, when the truck stopped still for hours and I wondered if they had simply left us in some desert place to rot, one of them began to talk to me. He kept telling me a long story about a mill in South Orgoreyn where he had worked, and how he had got into trouble with an overseer. He talked and talked in his soft dull voice and kept putting his hand on mine as if to be sure he had my attention. The sun was getting west of us and as we stood slewed around on the shoulder of the road a shaft of light entered in the window-slit; suddenly, even back in the box, one could see. I saw a girl, a filthy, pretty, stupid, weary girl looking up into my face as she talked, smiling timidly, looking for solace. The young Orgota was in kemmer, and had been drawn to me. The one time any one of them asked anything of me, and I couldn't give it. I got up and went to the window-slit as if for air and a look out, and did not come back to my place for a long time.

That night the truck went up long grades, down, up again. From time to time it halted inexplicably. At each halt a frozen, unbroken silence lay outside the steel walls of our box, the silence of vast waste lands, of the heights. The one in kemmer still kept the place beside mine, and still sought to touch me. I stood up for a long time again with my face pressed to the steel mesh of the window, breathing clean air that cut my throat and lungs like a razor. My hands pressed against the metal door became numb. I realized at last that they were or soon would be frostbitten. My breath had made a little ice-bridge between my lips and the mesh. I had to break this bridge with my fingers before I could turn away. When I huddled down with the others I began to shake with cold, a kind of shaking I had not experienced, jumping, racking spasms like the convulsions of fever. The truck started up again. Noise and motion gave an illusion of warmth, dispelling that utter, glacial silence, but I was still too cold to sleep that night. I thought we were at a fairly high altitude most of the night, but it was hard to tell, one's breathing, heartbeat, and energy-level being unreliable indicators, given the circumstances.