I am wildly and passionately fond of the water. I love the sea despite its being too vast and uncontrollable ever to be really mastered; I love rivers and their evanescent beauty as they flow out of sight; in particular I love the marsh, where a whole world of invisible aquatic life seethes. The marsh is, as I say, a universe apart, with its own permanent inhabitants, its own migratory creatures, its own voice, its own sounds and above all its own sense of mystery. There is nothing that makes one more wary, more uneasy, nothing more frightening sometimes, than a swamp. What is the fear that hovers over these low, watery plains? Is it the vague murmur of the reeds, the strange fireflies, the deep silence enveloping all on calm nights, the weird mists shrouding the rushes, or is it perhaps the barely audible lapping of the water, so soft, so gentle and yet sometimes more terrifying than human gunfire or thunder from above. Is it all this which makes the marsh a nightmarish spot, a place of fear, concealing perhaps a dangerous and unfathomable secret?

No, there’s something else to it. A different secret, even deeper and older, still floats on the dense fogs. Perhaps it contains the secret of creation itself! For was it not in stagnant, muddy water and the heavy humidity of wet land warming in the heat of the sun that the first stirrings, the first movements and the beginnings of life itself were felt?

It was evening when I reached my cousin’s house and cold enough to split stone. During dinner, my cousin, wearing a sealskin jacket and looking like some exotic Siberian animal, told me about the arrangements he had made for starting out that very night. We ate in the great hall where every sideboard, every wall and even the ceiling were festooned with stuffed birds – sparrow-hawks, herons, owls, nightjars, buzzards, harriers, vultures and falcons, some with wings outstretched, some perched on branches which were themselves hooked on to nails.

In order to reach the place chosen for our shoot by half past four we were to leave at about three-thirty in the morning. A shelter made of blocks of ice had been built there to keep out the terrible wind of the hours before daylight. It is the sort of wind which is so cold that it cuts into your flesh like a saw, pinches like a pair of pliers, stings like a poisoned dart and burns like fire.

My cousin was rubbing his hands.

‘I’ve never known such a frost,’ he said, ‘we were down to twelve below zero at six this evening.’