They had been saved by the light of dawn, which had shown them a place to touch down: a landing strip that, however, was evidently too short for this kind of plane. It dead-ended in woods. Which seemed an awkward way to lay out a landing strip. But as Zula began to understand, the people who had put it there hadn’t been afforded a lot of choice. This was some sort of valley in high mountains. It was spacious enough, wandering across several square miles of high cold territory, but its shape was convoluted, and its bottom was hacked up by gullies and ridged with outcroppings of hard rock, leaving few alternatives as to where a landing strip might be constructed. And culture shock might have been a factor; maybe Pavel and Sergei, accustomed to big international airports and Hyatts, had not made allowances for north woods bush-pilot dash, and had imputed prudence, or at least sanity, to the architects of this strip.