Next he knew he found himself in the sandy snow of the Sofistkaya, passing his own little hut, and saw the white smoke rising from the crude stone chimney. He thought of the samovar inside singing on a shelf, of the warmth and comfort that he would never know again, of his beloved father who somehow, by some terrible fate which had descended upon him out of the skies, was gone forever from the bench and the stitching-frame. The two soldiers drove Peter on and in time they went over the wooden bridge across the frozen Ingoda, and up a hill. The tears on his face and frozen in his lids gave him great pain from cold. But he brushed his eyes clear of the ice particles and looked ahead. Before him were the yellow upright logs of the great prison stockade—and the great gate waiting to receive him into the Gethsemane of the Valley of Despair. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I TWENTY YEARS AFTER KATERIN was awake before dawn. She lay still, listening in the dark for sounds of conflict in the city. For months she had been accustomed to the rattle of rifle-fire through day and night, and now she found it hard to realize that the looting and burning had ceased. The windows of Katerin’s room were hung with heavy blankets to conceal the candlelight by night, even though in the winter the glass of the panes was always nearly covered with heavy frost. She had no way of knowing how near it was to dawn, or if the day had come. Katerin Stephanovna Kirsakoff—that was her full name. And she was hiding in an old log house with her father, who had been retired from the army of the Czar with the rank of general. And her father was Michael Alexandrovitch Kirsakoff, once Governor in the Valley of Despair, as it was known in the exile days before the revolution. And the log house was in Chita, where Kirsakoff had ruled his Cossacks, but Kirsakoff and his daughter were now hiding from the Cossacks. Katerin rose from her bed, and guided by the dim, shaded flame burning before the icon in the corner of the room, she held out her arms to the image of the Virgin Mother, and whispered, “Save us, Mother of God, again this day, from those who beset us, and bring to us help from our enemies in our time of danger!” She continued to whisper her prayers while she dressed in the dark. Then she went to one of the windows and pulled aside the blanket. She scraped a tiny hole in the frost so that she might look down into the courtyard, to the end of the street and out over the plains which stretched away from the city toward the border of Manchuria, many versts away. In that direction lay safety, but Katerin knew that she could not get out of the city, much less cross those frozen plains.