Xenophon stepped up the pace of his harangue, calling upon the men to seek out their brothers who might be too weak or demoralized to emerge from the snow, pleading with them to build their fires high and warm themselves. He denied the bitter cold and threw off his cloak, stripping himself naked in the biting air as if for his morning exercises, insisting that he felt no discomfort. He seized an axe that had been struck into a tree and began to noisily hack at a rotten stump, until before my very eyes hundreds, thousands of men and surviving animals emerged from their frozen hell and began re-entering the land of the living. Someone took Xenophon's axe from his hands and started to split the wood, someone else kindled the fire, and soon the air was redolent again of the fragrance of smoke and oil and roasted mule...
- Ford, Micheal Curtis The Ten Thousand. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002. (p. 370)
