In which a condemned man, cast into the desolation of Siberia, endures not merely punishment of the body but that more terrible tribunal of the soul, where pride, suffering, memory, and the dim stirrings of conscience contend in mournful silence. Around him gather grief, devotion, illness, and the strange fellowship of the wretched, until the bleak world of prison becomes charged with inward crisis and the tremulous possibility of a life not yet understood.