Alexander and Ivan are sound engineers; a rattling train took them to Transbaikalia. They thought that this would be another expedition, that they would record the necessary surrounding sounds and, having done their job, would return home. Their main goal was to record in the Marble Gorge, a rotting camp hidden deep in the mountains, a fragment of the Gulag. But what they heard and recorded was not at all what they expected. Everything around them that had seemed inanimate, gone, suddenly began to acquire its own voice.