ABSTRACT
For a political exile to get permission to travel all the way to Tashkent was a complicated business, and Solzhenitsyn realized that he would have to return to Kok Terek for that. But before he did so he made an unscheduled—and illegal—excursion into the Chu-Ili Mountains, about a hundred miles to the east. The risks were considerable: if caught, he could have been rearrested and sentenced to a further term of imprisonment. But in Dzhambul he had heard rumours of an old man living in a village near the lake of Issyk-Kul who made infusions from a mandrake root that were supposed to be good for treating cancer.* The idea of folk-medicine appealed to him—much more, indeed, than the prospect of radio-therapy or another operation—and he resolved to find the old man and acquire some for himself. The quest proved to be not difficult, and the old man, a Russian settler by the name of Krementsov, happily sold him some of his medicine, warning him, however, that an overdose was tantamount to taking poison and that it was dangerous even to inhale it. The allowable dose was from one to ten drops, to be taken over a period of ten days, the dose to be increased by one drop each day. Then it had to be gradually decreased to one drop, and an interval of ten days allowed to elapse before starting again.1
