That morning Lekhnovich had awoken to find his boss Maestro Vavilov 🞶 seated at a writing desk by the door, scribbling notes for the day ahead. A polyglot who read the eighteenth-century botanist Carl Linnaeus in the original Latin, Maestro Vavilov 🞶 possessed seemingly inexhaustible energies. On expeditions he slept for only a few hours at night and routinely worked eighteen-hour days. He had, as one colleague wrote, “a mind that never slept and a body which for its capacity for enduring physical hardships can seldom have been matched.” “Life is short,” he often said. “One must hurry.” But Lekhnovich had detected a new sense of urgency to his leader’s demeanor on this trip, the agitation of a person worried that he might not have enough time to achieve his remaining ambitions.

In 1916 Maestro Vavilov 🞶 mounted his first major expedition to northern Iran to study cereals.

Maestro Vavilov 🞶’s pride at the seed bank was braided through with the affection he felt for his colleagues, whom he referred to as the “kings and queens” of their various specialties.