As I knew later, we were crossing the Sembensyens that night, and must have gone up over nine thousand feet on the passes.

I was not much troubled by hunger. The last meal I remembered eating was that long and heavy dinner in Shusgis' house; they must have fed me in Kundershaden, but I had no recollection of it. Eating did not seem to be a part of this existence in the steel box, and I did not often think about it. Thirst, on the other hand, was one of the permanent conditions of life. Once daily at a stop the trap, evidently set into the rear-door for this purpose, was unbolted; one of us thrust out the plastic jug and it was soon thrust back in filled, along with a brief gust of icy air. There was no way to measure out the water among us. The jug was passed, and each got three or four good swallows before the next hand reached for it. No one person or group acted as dispensers or guardians; none saw to it that a drink was saved for the man who coughed, though he was now in a high fever. I suggested this once and those around me nodded, but it was not done. The water was shared more or less equally-no one ever tried to get much more than his share—and was gone within a few minutes. Once the last three, up against the forward wall of the box, got none, the jug being dry when it came to them. The next day two of them insisted on being first in line, and were. The third lay huddled in his front corner unstirring, and nobody saw to it that he got his share. Why didn't I try to? I don't know. That was the fourth day in the truck. If I had been passed over I'm not sure I would have made an effort to get my share. I was aware of his thirst and his suffering, and the sick man's, and the others', much as I was aware of my own. I was unable to do anything about any of this suffering, and therefore accepted it, as they did, placidly.

I know that people might behave very differently in the same circumstances. These were Orgota, people trained from birth in a discipline of cooperation, obedience, submission to a group purpose ordered from above. The qualities of independence and decision were weakened in them. They had not much capacity for anger. They formed a whole, I among them; each felt it, and it was a refuge and true comfort in the night, that wholeness of the huddled group each drawing life from the others. But there was no spokesman for the whole, it was headless, passive.

Men whose will was tempered to a sharper edge might have done much better: talked more, shared the water more justly, given more ease to the sick, and kept their courage higher. I don't know. I only know what it was like inside that truck.

On the fifth morning, if my count is right, from the day I wakened in the truck, it stopped. We heard talking outside and calling back and forth. The steel rear-doors were unbolted from the outside and flung wide open.

One by one we crept to that open end of the steel box, some on hands and knees, and jumped or crawled down onto the ground. Twenty-four of us did. Two dead men, the old corpse and a new one, the one who had not got his drink of water for two days, were dragged out.

It was cold outside, so cold and so glaring with white sunlight on white snow that to leave the fetid shelter of the truck was very hard, and some of us wept. We stood bunched up beside the great truck, all of us naked and stinking, our little whole, our night-entity exposed to the bright cruel daylight. They broke us up, made us form a line, and led us towards a building a few hundred yards away. The metal walls and snow-covered roof of the building, the plain of snow all around, the great range of mountains that lay under the rising sun, the vast sky, all seemed to shake and glitter with excess of light.

We were lined up to wash ourselves at a big trough in a frame hut; everybody began by drinking the wash-water. After that we were led into the main building and given undershirts, gray felt shirts, breeches, leggings, and felt boots. A guard checked off our names on a list as we filed into the refectory, where with a hundred or more other people in gray we sat at bolted-down tables and were served breakfast: grain-porridge and beer. After that the whole lot of us, new prisoners and old, were divided up into squads of twelve. My squad was taken to a sawmill a few hundred yards behind the main building, inside the fence. Outside the fence and not far from it a forest began that covered the folded hills as far to northward as the eye could see. Under the direction of our guard we carried and stacked sawn boards from the mill to a huge shed where lumber was stored through the winter.

It was not easy to walk, stoop, and lift loads, after the days in the truck. They didn't let us stand idle, but they didn't force the pace either. In the middle of the day we were served a cupful of the unfermented grain-brew, orsh; before sunset we were taken back to the barracks and given dinner, porridge with some vegetables, and beer. By nightfall we were locked into the dormitory, which was kept fully lighted all night. We slept on five-foot-deep shelves all around the walls of the room in two tiers. Old prisoners scrambled for the upper tier, the more desirable, since heat rises. For bedding each man was issued a sleeping-bag at the door. They were coarse heavy bags,В foul with other men's sweat, but well insulated and warm. Their drawback for me was their shortness. An average-sized Gethenian could get clear inside head and all, but I couldn't; nor could I ever stretch out fully on the sleeping-shelf. TheВ place wasВ calledВ PulefenВ CommensalityВ В Third VoluntaryВ В FarmВ В andВ В ResettlementВ В Agency.В В Pulefen, District Thirty, is in the extreme northwest of the habitable zone of Orgoreyn, bounded by theВ Sembensyen Mountains, the Esagel River, and the coast. The area is thinly settled, without big cities. The town nearest us was a place called Turuf, several miles to the southwest; I never saw it. The Farm was on the edge of a great unpopulated forest region,В Tarrenpeth.В Too far north for the larger trees, hemmen or serem or black vate, the forest was all of one kind of tree, a gnarled scrubby conifer ten or twelve feet high, gray-needled, called thore. Though the number of native species, plant or animal, on Winter is unusually small, the membership of each species is very large: there were thousands of square miles of thore-trees, and nothing much else, in that one forest. Even the wilderness is carefully husbanded there, and though that forest had been logged for centuries there were no waste places in it, no desolations of stumps, no eroded slopes. It seemed that every tree in it was accounted for, and that not one grain of sawdust from our mill went unused. There was a small plant on the Farm, and when the weather prevented parties from going out into the forest we worked in the mill or in the plant, treating and compressing chips, bark, and sawdust into various forms, and extracting from the dried thore-needles a resin used in plastics.

The work was genuine work, and we were not overdriven. If they had allowed a little more food and better clothing much of the work would have been pleasant, but we were too hungry and cold most of the time for any pleasure. The guards were seldom harsh and never cruel. They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate—not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge. Among my fellow-prisoners I had also for the first time on Winter a certain feeling of being a man among women, or among eunuchs. The prisoners had that same flabbiness and coarseness. They were hard to tell apart; their emotional tone seemed always low, their talk trivial. I took this lifelessness and leveling at first for the effect of the privation of food, warmth, and liberty, but I soon found out that it was more specific an effect than that: it was the result of the drugs given all prisoners to keep them out of kemmer.