The island looked especially attractive from above. A pilot had only to take off in his plane to catch a view of two ridges, overgrown with vegetation and towering along the western and eastern shores. These two mountain ranges, wrapped in taiga, fringed the island on two sides, like a living green wall, and extended for hundreds of miles from north to south, divided by the Tym and Poronai rivers. These rivers were fed by streams that wound down from the mountains through gorges and waterfalls, but even at twice the speed of sound, the eye could see, along the slopes and in the river valley, flat patches of green, which the locals had called elanya, from time immemorial. Over the time since the Russians had first come to the island, indigenous words such as these had become firmly rooted i
