Now, in the warmth of this kitchen, there is nothing more for me to do but wait for the journey's pitching and tossing, still active in my body, to calm down. Several days on the train, then the aircraft, and finally the terrible tracked vehicle that brought me here across the icy wastes. And the last stage: the interminable hike along that cable swathed in frost, stumbling painfully to arrive at the Edge. At the edge of what? At the edge of everything. Of inhabited land, of the Arctic, of the polar night. The rope ended there, nailed to the timbers of the very last house.

I manage to move my feet in my boots. My hands, my finger joints, are coming back to life, obeying me. I can grip the cup without spilling it, as happened just now. "The goal has been reached," I think with a smile. I am here, in the terrain Jacques Dorme once flew over. Tomorrow I shall see the place where a life I have carried inside of me since childhood was ruptured. His life and that of the woman who had loved him. In the blissful drowsiness of my exhaustion, those lives of long ago come awake behind my eyelids, revive that tale of a day, a city, the imagined memory of a night. That night when the rain mimicked the staccato rattle of the amber beads…

"Tell me, my friend, have you heard the one about the young man from Moscow, a bit like you, who arrives in the taiga of Yakutia? Listen. I'll tell you…"

One of my hosts is speaking. There are three of them in the house on the Edge. Two are these geologists who shook hands with me, both, by a comic coincidence, proffering the same name: Lev. Two Leos, two lions, I said to myself, suppressing a smile. The first of them, tall, with broad shoulders, evidently read my mind and sought to clarify matters. "Now see here. I'm the real lion. He's only a cub…" The other, short and with a face marked by chilblains, exclaimed: "Shut your mouth, Trotsky!" By way of a welcome I had joined them in a glass of that inhuman brew, alcohol barely sweetened with cranberry syrup, and then, with almost magical ease, succeeded in getting myself accepted to join their next day's expedition.