If you are stopped suddenly by a penetrating blue and your heart stops, as it sometimes happened only in childhood, from astonishment and delight... If all petty worries, all the vanities of the world, fall away like autumn leaves, and the soul takes wing and is filled with light and silence. If, suddenly, the ready word holds back, and you feel that nature has its own language and that it is now clearly understood. If a simple earthly wonder has entered your life and you have felt it ennobled by this encounter - it means, this is Baikal.
Baikal water is truly living: from the surface to the depths, 1637 metres, Baikal has given a home to a multitude of forms of life. Unlike all other deep lakes of the world in which the lower depths are dead, poisoned by hydrogen sulphide and other gases, here the entire thickness is rich in oxygen. The water is mixed both by horizontal sea currents, around the lake and around each of its three hollows, and by vertically rising and falling currents. Now, scientists have discovered that thermal springs beat up from the bottom of Baikal, and no kind of pressure - and at the very bottom of Baikal it is enormous - can prevent the underground forces from driving out these jets.
Baikal is 25 million years old! Scientists, having calculated the yearly build-up of sediment, give it still many years of life.
Baikal is 636 kilometres long and has a surface area of 31,500 square kilometres. By such standards there are lakes more expansive than Baikal - in Africa and America. But there is none among the world's freshwater lakes that is deeper than Baikal: Lake Tanganyika at its deepest is 1,435 metres, Lake Issyk-Kul - 702 metres. But in. Baikal, by the shores of its largest island, Olkhor, a plumb-line will reach the 1,637-metre mark.
If, having drunk of the crystal waters and delighted in the jubilant rollers beating on the pebbles of the shore, lighting up like holiday fireworks, you return to your own hearths and homes and you suddenly feel that something is missing. If you suddenly sense in your soul something bright and elevated. If suddenly you feel you want to get a ticket for a plane or train and once again set off on the road. You understand: THIS IS BAIKAL. |
