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The beauty of Baikal

Sacred sea", "sacred lake", "sacred water" - these names have been given to Lake Baikal since time immemorial by the indigenous population, by the Russians who came to these shores in the 17th century, and by foreign travelers in their admiration for its majestic and unearthly beauty.

We do not insist that there is nothing more beautiful than Baikal: each of us has a soft spot, an affection for his own part of the world; an Eskimo or Aleutian regards the tundra and the icy wilderness as the crowning glory of natural perfection. We absorb the scenery of our native land from our birth; it moulds our character and determines to a considerable extent our human essence. It is therefore not enough to say that it is dear to us, for we are part of it. There is no sense in comparing the icy stretches of Greenland with the sands of the Sahara, or the Siberian taiga with the steppes of Central Russia, or even the Caspian with Lake Baikal. We can only give our impressions of them. And yet Nature has her favorites that she polishes with special care at the time of creation and endows with special power. Baikal is indubitably one of these.

Even if you only stay here for a short while and see but a tiny bit of it, you can get the feel of Baikal, if not understand it fully. In cases like this, the feeling depends on you, on your ability or inability to absorb the spirit of the place.

That spirit of Baikal is something special, something that actually exists, something that makes you believe old legends and pause to wonder, with mystic misgivings, whether man is at liberty to do as he deems fit in certain places. One would have expected Baikal to overwhelm man with its grandeur and its immensity - everything about it is so big, so spacious, so free, and so baffling - yet, on the contrary, it ennobles man. Here you experience a rare sensation of uplift and spirituality, as if, within sight of eternity and perfection, you too have been touched by the mysterious influence of these magic concepts, you too are enveloped in the breath of the omnipotent presence, and a part of the magic secret of everything that exists has entered into you. You are marked and singled out simply because you are standing on this shore, breathing this air and drinking this water. Nowhere else will you feel so much at one with nature.

Returning from a stroll one day, Tolstoy wrote,

"Is it possible that the feeling of bitterness, vengefulness, the passion for destruction of one's own kind can survive in a man amid such entrancing scenery? Everything bad in the heart of man should, it seems, disappear in contact with nature - that direct expression of the beautiful and the good."

Nature is of itself moral, only man can make it immoral. And how are we to know if it is not probably nature that keeps us to a considerable degree within those more or less reasonable bounds by which our moral condition is determined, and is it not nature that fortifies our good sense and good conduct? Is it not nature that looks into our eyes night and day with prayer, hope and warning? And can it be that we still do not heed that call?

There was a time when an Evenk, before cutting down a silver birch on the shores of Baikal, would recite a long prayer of penitence, begging the tree's forgiveness for his need to destroy it. We are different now. That is why we find in ourselves that power to stay the soulless force threatening not just a birch-tree, as two or three hundred years ago, but Old Father Baikal himself, for we return an hundredfold to nature what was put into us - kindness for kindness, favour for favour - and so round the eternal cycle of our moral being.

The crowning glory and mystery of nature, Baikal was not created for production needs but for us to drink its water, its priceless and most important wealth, marvel at its stately beauty and breathe its precious air. First and for most, we need it ourselves.

We can hardly help repeating: how good it is to have Baikal! Regal and untamed, mighty, rich, majestic and beautiful in so many, many ways!

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