I so don’t want to write. No — I must. I noticed that if I don’t write immediately, but only the next day, I lose part of my impressions — the most valuable ones, fresh in feeling and perception — the very ones that let you find the right, precise words consonant with the moment and the event.

Perhaps I write what everyone already understands. Is all this necessary? Yes. Not everyone is given the chance to breathe in the joy of the Earth’s fragrance.

In flight I often caught myself thinking that it makes no difference to me whether we’re flying over our territory or someone else’s. The feeling of the native Earth is always with you, wherever you are. From space there is no foreign Earth; it is one, and you perceive all of it as your home.

I had a surprising feeling of warmth toward Australia, which I’d visited after my first flight. Flying over it, it lay before me — somehow sun-colored, with the dark tracery of small mountains in the south, a rainbow of rock folds, the plateaus of deserts, as if nature had wanted to display all its beauty and wealth here, with pink, green, white, and crimson saucers of lakes in its center. And nearby, at the southern shores, the dark mass of mountains and solid forests of Tasmania lay like a watchdog.

During the day we measured noise levels on the station. After switching off all noisy equipment, the silence actually presses on you, and living in it would probably be even harder. This background somehow soothes, breaking the sense of our solitude and separation from Earth. There’s a whole orchestra on board — hundreds of instruments constantly working. The noise is somewhat higher than if the station were on the ground, because we’re in an enclosed volume amplifying every sound like a barrel, and since there’s a vacuum outside, hull vibrations aren’t damped.

We crossed the Mozambique Channel; below us is Madagascar — a giant flower bed in colorful patches. Now it’s spring there.

And again beneath us is the Indian Ocean. I search for the islands of Mauritius and Reunion, often hidden by cloud caps from their warm volcanic breath. And there they are, like lonely towers in the boundless ocean. I know them from 1967, when as a young engineer I was appointed technical leader of a search squadron for meeting the automatic “Zond” stations — the first to fly around the Moon and return to Earth on a polar orbit. What paradoxes of life: slow and steady wins the race — the turtles on “Zond-5” were the first to fly around the Moon.

By work today, we transmitted video to the ground from the “Niva” recorder for geologists, while I narrated the images they watched at TsUP. I think that in the coming years, TV systems for continuous observation of the Earth’s surface will appear on stations, so specialists can receive video directly without crew involvement.

Today, for the first time in four months, I had an afternoon nap. A good hour’s sleep, then for two comm sessions there was a meeting with the political commentator Bovin. Interestingly, he tells us about relations with the USA as we fly right over the States.

My mood is somehow detached, like after defending a thesis. The hard part was before; now the major part of the program is done. I’ve noticed the workload has significantly eased and life has settled into a normal working groove.