The story presents an unique vista of the history of humanity from the start of the Vedic era in ancient India to the present imperial age, intertwined with the development of culture, science, and the changing pattern of antihuman mythologies, both religious and political in nature. As the story unfolds, a love story with a universal dimension takes over the foreground with a continuing exploration that becomes evermore focused onto the precious in our humanity. As a part of the Kaleidoscope Project, it is a gem from Book 2, The Ice Age Challenge, of my epic series of novels The Lodging for the Rose. The frame of the story is a fictional, international peace conference organized by the youth of the world, convened in Russia in a city on the Black Sea. The story has a special significance in the Kaleidoscope Project, for its unique historic focus and its wide perspective, even while it is a part of a much larger work that has its own unique history. I started to write books that I would love, that are filled with a kaleidoscope of superlatives that define the riches of our humanity. My writing project began with two small novels, Flight Without Limits - a science fiction experiment to open the portal to the human superlatives - and a larger novel, Brighter than the Sun - a fictional project to explore the human dimension of the greatest intentional catastrophe that humanity has prepared against itself, termed "thermonuclear war" that is still on the agenda. The larger novel explores against the background of catastrophe, the superlatives of the inner and enduring riches of our humanity. Both projects exceeded expectations. But the work didn't stop there. It just began. It became apparent that the human superlatives are so rich that that they are best explored simply by themselves, for their own merit, so that a super-imposed context would tend to dilute them. The result became a series of twelve novels that I subsequently named, The Lodging for the Rose. It became a kaleidoscope-experience of superlatives, where new vistas of our inner riches come into view with every turn. As one might expect, many of the vistas are precious in themselves, so that it soon became apparent that quite a number of them can stand on their own as complete stories and are important in this context to provide a specific focus that is of critical importance by itself. I cherish these individual stories. Consequently, I started to share them separately in different forms, including now in printed form. The separate printing also allows a larger type face to be used.