Directly after supper I plunged straight into bed and went to sleep by the light of an enormous fire blazing in my hearth. As three struck, I was awoken. I put on a sheepskin and Karl when I met him was wrapped in a bearskin. After we had each drunk two cups of boiling hot coffee followed by two glasses of liqueur brandy we set off, accompanied by a keeper and by our two dogs, Plongeon and Pierrot.

As soon as I stepped outside I was frozen to the marrow. It was one of those nights when the world seems dead with cold. The frozen air becomes an almost tangible presence so badly does it hurt. Not a breath of wind stirs; all is rigid, motionless. The atmosphere bites, cuts, dries up and kills all trees, plants and insects; sometimes small birds fall dead to the frozen ground where they too stiffen at once in its icy embrace.

The pale moon in its last quarter and tilted to one side seemed to hang half-dead in space, too weak to go on and itself paralysed by the severity of the weather in the heavens. Casting a weak, mournful light on the world it shed the usual pale glimmer it gives each month at the end of its resurrection.

Karl and I walked side by side, backs hunched against the cold, our hands in our pockets and guns under the arm. Our shoes had been wrapped in wool so that we could walk without slipping on the frozen river. Now they made no sound and as we walked on I watched the breath of our dogs rise as white steam beneath us.

We were soon at the edge of the marsh and turned into one of the pathways of dry rushes leading through this miniature forest. Our elbows brushing against the long, ribbonlike leaves made a soft sound. I was gripped as never before by the very powerful and particular emotion which the marsh produces within me. This one felt stone dead of cold as we trod on its surface through the dried-up reeds.

Suddenly, as we came round a bend in one of the pathways, I saw the ice hut constructed to shelter us. I went in, and since we had an hour to wait before any stray bird might awaken I rolled myself up in my wrap and tried to get warm. Lying on my back I began to look at the crooked moon which, distorted through the semi-transparent walls of this igloo, looked like four horns in the sky. Soon the cold from the frozen marsh together with the condensation coming off the walls and dropping on us from above had got so deep into me that I began to cough. My cousin Karl became suddenly worried.

‘Never mind if we don’t have much of a bag today,’ he said. ‘I certainly don’t want you to catch cold. Come on let’s build a fire.’