Most of all, though, they were venturers into the misty void. To stop at the land's end in the warm spring dusk and to let their gaze soar up from that ultimate brink toward the shy pallor of the first stars…
After several months, their numbers much reduced since the start, they finally halted, on this extremity of their native Eurasia. There, where the earth, the sky, and the ocean are one… And in a smoke-filled yurt, in the heart of the taiga, where winter still reigned, a woman, whose snake body was horribly distorted, writhed as she expelled an extraordinarily large infant onto a bearskin. He had slanting eyes like his mother, and prominent cheekbones like all his kinsmen. But his damp hair glistened. A flash of dark gold.
And the people thronged around the young mother in silent contemplation of this new Siberian.
What had come down to us of this mythical past was but a remote legend. An echo muted by the confused hubbub of the centuries. In our imaginations the cossacks had still not finished hacking a route for themselves through the virgin taiga. And a young Yakut girl, clad in a short sable coat, was forever rummaging in the tangle of stems and branches in search of the famous Kharg root… It was surely no coincidence if the power that dreams, songs, and legends had over our barbarian hearts was irresistible. Our own life was turning into a dream!
And yet in our day all that was left of this memory of the centuries was a heap of worm-eaten wood on top of granite blocks covered in lichen.