"The Land of the Bearded Ones"

Abstract

In 1940, on the little island of Faddei near Cape Cheliuskin in Sims Bay on the Taimyr, hydrologists unexpectedly discovered traces of tragic events that occurred nearly 300 years ago, in about 1619-1620, in these wild and still deserted places at the of the world. The hydrologists found vestiges of a wintering camp established as the result of a catastrophe and the last camp of some unknown Russian seafarers. Among their belongings on the bare rock at the very edge of the ocean was a metal disk - a bronze mirror bearing the image of a centaur.