Peking is the destination of a young Russian reporter’s dangerous assignment and the starting point of his escape with a concealed Communist leader. In the embedded tale, the city is not merely a setting: its hidden cellar confines both men, while their fevered flight beyond it opens onto a vast, uncertain landscape where memory and possible death converge.

The assignment and the hidden leader

At twenty-five, the young man works for a Moscow newspaper and has become its star reporter. He accepts an assignment to interview a Communist leader hiding somewhere in China, despite warnings that the journey will be difficult and that reaching Peking may be dangerous because people are trying to prevent the leader’s words from getting out. Once he finds the leader in a cellar, the reporter decides to do more than conduct the interview: he will help him escape the country.

The leader’s face in candlelight recalls that of a Mexican detective and former soldier under Pancho Villa. This resemblance gives the scene a connection to the young man’s earlier narrative, without making the two figures identical. In the cellar, the pair fall ill from the same pestilence. Their shared fever collapses the distinction between interview and ordeal: they talk and rave, the leader sees dragons flying low over Peking, and the reporter imagines a battle and urges his comrades onward.

Escape from the city

When the day of their planned flight arrives, both men have temperatures of 102 degrees. They cross Peking and escape, with horses and provisions waiting in the countryside. Because the leader has never ridden before, the young reporter teaches him how. Their flight therefore depends not only on secrecy and endurance but on a practical act of instruction between two men who have become companions under pressure.

Leaving Peking carries them through a forest and then enormous mountains. Under stars that seem supernatural, the leader wonders how the stars were created and where the universe begins and ends. The young man hears him and recalls a wound in his side, an earlier darkness and journey, and the hypnotist whose features remain indistinct in memory. He wants to recover her image by closing his eyes, but keeps them open as the pair cross a broad snow-covered plain. The leader sings while the horses sink into the snow and his questions about the universe continue.

The city as a narrative threshold

Peking’s importance lies in the contrast between the concealed room and the open country beyond it. In the cellar, illness and feverish visions hold the two men in a cramped, hidden space; once they escape, the scale widens to forests, mountains, stars, and snow. Yet flight does not mean safety. The leader falls from his horse, and the reporter, recognizing that the fever is consuming them both, ties him to his mount and presses on across the plain.

The sequence belongs to an embedded story rather than the novel’s ordinary chronological narration. Its shift from a boy’s wandering to the twenty-five-year-old reporter’s assignment makes Peking one stage in a larger, discontinuous passage through identities, memories, and journeys. The city is where the reporter’s decision to help transforms an interview into an escape, but the narrative carries that decision into an exposed landscape whose silence and apparent vastness offer no assurance of survival.