Of course, they too experienced love on occasion. There were these women with slanting eyes and impassive faces that seemed as if haunted by mysterious smiles. The cossacks made love to them on bearskins in the smoky darkness of yurts, beside the glowing embers. But the bodies of these taciturn lovers were passing strange. Anointed with reindeer fat, their bodies slipped from your grasp. To hold on to them, you had to twist their long glistening tresses, as black and coarse as a horse's mane, around your fist. Their breasts were flat and round, like the domes of the oldest churches in Kiev, and their hips were firm and resistant. But once tamed by the hand holding back their manes, their bodies no longer slipped away. Their eyes blazed like the cutting edges of sabers, their lips grew rounded, ready to bite. And the scent of their skin, tanned by the fire and the cold, became more and more pungent, intoxicating. And this intoxication did not fade away… The cossack would wind the tresses around his fist a second time. And in the narrow eyes of the woman there flashed a spark of mischief. Has he not drunk a draft of that viscous, brownish infusion – the blood of the Kharg root – which floods your veins with the power of all your ancestors?
Breaking the spell, the cossack would go back to his companions, and for several more days he would be impervious to the bite of the cold. The Kharg root was singing in his veins.
Their goal was always that improbable Far East with its thrilling promise of the land's end: the great misty void, so dear to their souls, that detested constraints, limits, frontiers.