… I became mesmerised by the taiga. Its snow-glazed desolation seemed only to deepen its vastness: one fifth of the forest of the entire earth. Often it runs over a thousand miles deep from north to south, and the suffocating closure of its trees, crowing out all distances, any perspectives, has driven people literally mad. Magnetic anomalies can doom even a sane traveller here, while his compass-point swings uselessly. Others start walking in a mania to escape – this is the 'taiga madness' – but return to their own tracks, until they drop exhausted or lose themselves in quicksand.

Colin Thubron, In Siberia