This is not a familiar route for Asiana, as is evident when a female voice tells us on arrival not to use our mobile phones until we are out of the plane.If only we could, we think, as the plane taxis past bleak snow-swept fields up to a small terminal with Kim Il Sung's grinning portrait atop it.
According to Air Force historian Alan Stephens, "as they took off into a bleak, snow-filled night they found themselves questioning the worth of the sortie, an attitude which doubtless was not shared by the eventual recipients".
It makes me wonder: what is the bleakest snow scene in all art?
Beside her, the other half of the split screen shows expanses of bleak white snow.
Aid groups warned that conditions even for those who made it outside the city were bleak, as snow blanketed Idlib province.
There are somber images, including an early Gauguin of the Seine, bleak in the snow, the river dark green, a few pedestrians hunched against the cold, dressed in black; a melancholy van Gogh of the terrace of La Guinguette cafe in Monmartre, in dark greens and browns; and a Carriere of Place Clichy at night, shrouded in a dense fog.
Just as the freezing snow of bleak midwinter is best enjoyed from behind a window, with a lovely open fire, so the sadness of a Christmas movie tends to come with a crackle of sentimental human warmth.
The island's bleak Antarctic climate, with perpetual snow covering three-fourths of the island, supports only hardy grasses and other tundra plants.
Despite the bleak circumstances, the pleasures of "Snow Hunters" are many, and they begin with Yoon's prose, at once lyrical and precise, as in this description of Yohan standing in front of his new home in the early morning: "The rain continued to fall.
You can tell he had never marched sinister-dexter like Auden's soldier along Hadrian's Wall in December nor mounted guard as the snow fell on a bleak river crossing in County Durham.
