It’s impossible to imagine that this place was ever inhabited. That camp officials and security personnel penned reports to Moscow, clanked glasses, read Soviet newspapers – all right here, in these surviving barrack buildings. That camp inmates lived close by, in tents, and that they, too, must have eaten and drunk and read. People looking to build up a picture of life in the “geologists’ settlement” don’t have a lot to go on beyond a handful of archival documents and fragmentary memories. “Just like everyone else at the time, we worked extremely strenuously,” recalls mine foreman Ivan Kudelka. “Discipline was tough. Us foremen had to stay on shift until the shift target was met, and since it never was, we’d often have to work two, three, sometimes even four shifts in a row.”

How did camp inmates, who would spend several years labouring in this gorge, manage to survive here, and what did they think about? Answering this question is next to impossible – very few human histories have come down to us. We’ve only the facts behind which these histories are hidden. It’s been established, for example, that more people escaped from the Marble Gorge camp than from the other camps in the Borsky system: 44 individuals in total. That there were seven bayans, two accordions, 15 guitars and 50 domino sets in the camp. And that, on occasion, letters sent there failed to reach their addressees. “Prisoner Abdulazimov hasn’t received any letters from his family for over a year because the letters he is sent are written in Chechen. The censor here cannot read them,” states one of the camp reports.