PORTRAITS OF SAKHALIN

It was 16 April. The piercing northwest wind was cold and gusty as the steamer lolled from side to side. I stood on the top deck and watched as the bleak, inhospitable rocky shoreline, still covered in snow, came into view. This first impression was gloomy, heavy and oppressive. The island stretched out like some kind of monster, dead and awaiting disposal, with ridges covering its back.

“This is where the Kostroma went down,” the captain told me.

I descended to the lower deck. Prisoners' faces crowded the deck's portholes as they gazed intently at the shoreline of the island where their lives would end. They gloomily muttered: “Sakalin!”

“It's still winter!”

“Let me see!”

“There's nothing to see. Everything's covered in snow.”

The steamer began to rock more violently. We were entering the La Perouse Straits. To the left was the Krilovsky lighthouse; to the right the roiling and frothing boulders of the submerged “Calamity Rock.” Straight ahead and drawing near, an ice floe. More ice floes obscured the horizon.

Here indeed was some bitter mockery: to transport people nearly around the globe, to show them a small corner of earthly paradise (magnificent blooming Ceylon), to give them “but a glance” of Singapore, that luxurious, divine, fantastic blooming garden a degree-and-a-half from the equator, to allow—near the entrance to Nagasaki—just a glimpse of Japan's magical and picturesque coast (a coastline you cannot tear your eyes away from), only to deliver them, after all this, to bleak rocky shores still covered in snow as of mid-April, to this land of blizzards, storms, fogs and ice floes—and then to say: “Thrive!”