During the day I was summarizing my geological observations. I plotted structures on a map, described them, and wrote brief annotations, since I need to send this material to Earth with the visiting expedition crew, whom we’re expecting soon. In the evening there was a meeting with the wives.

Dear Lyusya — I don’t know what caused it, whether she’s aware of the conversation — was joking and speaking without much spirit. She told me about our son, who writes from camp that he misses them so much he carries her letters against his chest and says: “These are from my dearest mommy.” He’s lonesome. He writes that he’s lost weight, running around with Umik — his friend from Grozny — like two brothers. On Tuesday Lyusya is also flying off to vacation in Pitsunda, so next week I’ll be alone. We’re now passing near Cape Horn.

I look at the ocean; its dark blue surface is covered with white strokes, like grains of rice. At first I thought they were icebergs, but their large number, uniform size, and even distribution seemed wrong. These are the crests of large waves from a storm raging below.

At 12:50 PM, to the right of our track on the descending pass in the Southern Hemisphere, I saw unusual clouds at high altitude above the masses of ordinary light-gray cloud cover — more precisely, a haze, like paint spilled on glass, a color between light pink and mustard, stretching for 1,000 km. I took several photos. We’re approaching South Georgia Island. An enormous mountain massif gleams in the sun’s rays with the relief snowy armor of its ridges, resembling a gigantic snow-white ship, and all around for hundreds of kilometers are beige ice fields in a complex tracery of cracks. These aren’t continuous fields; the space is covered with ice in a lacework of dark lines, spirals, arcs, etc. There’s some incomprehensible yet somehow familiar pattern in these traceries. Then I remembered what this drawing resembles — the structure of the water surface in a sun glare.

As if living water, with its currents, unevenness, and eddies, had been instantly frozen. And south of the island, toward Antarctica, in breaks in the clouds, the South Sandwich Islands are visible — a string of small dark spots, above which rising currents, cutting through the creeping cloud cover, form a ripple of wakes in a diverging herringbone pattern, resembling the stern wakes behind ships and creating the impression of a squadron moving through a cloudy ocean.