Day off — that’s just the name. In the morning I started preparing the geology report. I’m pleased with the results obtained. Then I got to work on the French “Echograph” equipment, since I have an experiment on it tomorrow. And now it’s time for wet cleaning of the station. Along with it, we cleaned the ventilator screens, which had accumulated a lot of debris: scraps from food packages, bits of insulation, lint from our suits and underclothes, lockwire, and also tiny nuts and bolts that flew off when removing equipment. We also found some useful things: felt-tip pens, ballpoints, rubber bands, adapter rings for film and camera lenses, etc. We replaced the anti-dust filters located at the end of the work compartment — two large frames about 0.5 x 0.5 m with felt fabric in an accordion fold. The filters are certainly useful, but at the same time somewhat inconvenient in that, by forcing air through themselves and cleaning it, they attract everything poorly secured: bits of equipment, documentation, cameras, tools, and hand-held instruments. So if you lose something and can’t find it where you put it, first check the anti-dust filters. Then we cleaned the porthole glass, which accumulates grease spots from our hands, faces, and breath during visual observations. Dirt settles on them from the constant air circulation. After all, it’s not like on Earth here — you can’t open a window, you can’t air out the house, so everything that accumulates in the air from our habitation circulates through the entire station until it gets caught by the harmful impurity filters. Besides that, we sand off small scratches on the protective layer of the portholes. During the day there was a meeting with the actress Kiriyenko. She spoke to us warmly, in a womanly way, and sang.

I’d like to say a few words about the position of crew doctor. At some point, someone made the sensible decision that each crew should have its own doctor — that is, its own trusted person who, observing us from the side during training, social interaction, and family relaxation, could point out our mistakes in time, come to our aid if someone fell ill, or draw us into a frank conversation when relations in the crew became strained. In short, this is our common friend, who isn’t assigned to us but is offered, giving us the opportunity to choose ourselves. Not for nothing did Tolya and I call our doctor the third crew member.

Another important aspect of his duties — or rather, his duty — is that all our internal crew problems remain his secret from everyone around, including his superiors. If this is observed — and it can’t be otherwise — we repay him with our trust, and with this awareness we go into flight knowing that there remains on Earth a person who will work alongside us and help us the entire time.

Small joys at cosmic altitude. We got lucky. Today the weather near Cape Horn was clear, the horizon was open, and the blue arc of the atmosphere was in silvery clouds, and we saw the northern tip of Antarctica — the continent of the South Pole. I photographed it.

We fly from Cape Horn to the Falkland Islands; to the east behind them you can see South Georgia Island, and everything stretching farther south is filled with enormous beige fields of ice resembling a shawl with fringed tassels unraveled and tangled at the edges. For the first time I managed to see the Strait of Magellan — a rare opportunity, since it’s mostly hidden by clouds, but today you could clearly see all the passages of the strait separating Tierra del Fuego from the continent.

This strait isn’t a straight line like a canal, but fjords crossing South America latitudinally from west to east, connected by channels. From above, the strait looks like a labyrinth resembling a trap that’s hard to escape from. If someone told me to navigate a ship through it from space, it wouldn’t be easy, and it’s unclear how the first navigators didn’t get lost but found their way through this cunning tangle of channels and branches. I can’t imagine.

On one of the orbits, passing along the western coast of North America, I suddenly saw an incredibly tall column of smoke. Yes, yes — I saw how it was twisted, this column, and it rose like a candle to the horizon. This was so unexpected and unusually captivating — and I’d already seen many smoke plumes from fires, dust storms, and industrial chimneys before. But what was this? I had a camera in my hands. I should have taken the photo right away and figured it out later. But apparently that’s how people are built — first you need to comprehend what you’re seeing. I started looking at the Earth, searching for the chimney that was producing such smoke, and I saw a volcano on the western coast of America.

So it’s an eruption that’s begun! I snapped to attention and wanted to photograph it, but the station, since we were in an unoriented position and drifting, had turned, and it passed out of view. I marked its coordinates and checked them against the map. It was the eruption of El Chichon volcano in Mexico. I’d read a lot before about how aerosol layers in the upper atmosphere and noctilucent clouds are formed by the ejection of enormous quantities of gas and dust from volcanoes, but I could never imagine what kind of cannon it was, what kind of force could shoot from the bowels of the Earth to a height of about 100 km. And now I saw it all in reality with my own eyes.