"I was there three times. The first time was in 1933, when I was ten - I travelled with my father when he went there to earn some money - then in 1937, without my father. And the last time was in 1947 as part of a group of youngsters.
"The ’Valley of Death’ extends along a right-hand tributary of the Viliuy River. In point of fact it is a whole chain of valleys along its flood lands. All three times I was there with a guide, a Yakut. We didn’t go there because life was good, but because there, in the back of beyond, you could pan for gold without the threat that at the end of the season you’d be robbed or get a bullet in the back of your head.
"As for mysterious objects, there are probably a lot of them there, as in three seasons I saw seven of those ’cauldrons’. They all struck me as totally perplexing: for one thing, there was their size - between six and nine meters in diameter.
"Secondly, they were made of some strange metal. Everyone has written that they were made of copper, but I’m sure it isn’t copper. The thing is that even a sharpened cold chisel will not mark the ’cauldrons’ (we tried more than once). The metal doesn’t break off and can’t be hammered. On copper, a hammer would definitely have left noticeable dents. But this ’copper’ is covered over with a layer of some unknown material resembling emery. Yet it’s not an oxidation layer and not scale - it can’t be chipped or scratched, either.
"We didn’t come across shafts going down into the ground with chambers. But I did note that the vegetation around the ’cauldrons’ is anomalous - totally different from what’s growing around. It’s more opulent: large-leaved burdock; very long withes; strange grass, one and a half or two times the height of a man. In one of the ’cauldrons’, the whole group of us (six people) spent the night. We didn’t sense anything bad, and we calmly left without any sort of unpleasant occurrences. Nobody fell seriously ill afterwards. Except that three months later, one of my friends lost all his hair. And on the left side of my head (the side I slept on), three small sore spots the size of match-heads appeared. I’ve tried to get rid of them all my life, but they’re still with me today.
"None of our efforts to break off even a small piece from the strange ’cauldrons’ was successful. The only thing I did manage to bring away was a stone. Not an ordinary one, though: half of a perfect sphere, six centimeters in diameter. It was black in colour and bore no visible signs of having been worked, yet was very smooth as if polished. I picked it up from the ground inside one of those cauldrons.
"I took my souvenir of Yakutia with me to the village of Samarka, Chuguyevka district, Primorsky region (the Soviet Far East), where my parents were living in 1933. I was laid up with nothing to do until my grandmother decided to build a house. We needed to put glass in the windows and there wasn’t a glass-cutter in the entire village. I tried scoring it with the edge of that half of a stone sphere, and it turned out to cut with amazing ease. After that, my find was often used like a diamond by all our relatives and friends. In 1937 I gave the stone to my grandfather, but that autumn he was arrested and taken to Magadan where he lived on without trial until 1968 and then died. Now no-one knows where my stone got to…"
