Alexandra is my name

" Truthfully, I am "homesick" for a land that is not mine. I am haunted by the steppes, the solitude, the everlasting snow and the great blue sky "up there”! The difficult hours, the hunger, the cold, the wind slashing my face, leaving me with enormous, bloody, swollen lips. "

(Alexandra David-Néel in a letter to her husband, Eugene Néel, 1916)