When I woke up, the world was far away

The loneliness of human beings makes them willing to believe that it is the distant starlight that has been seen after hundreds of millions of light-years of solitude. And there is silence and echo in life.

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at the end of autumn, I went to Lake Baikal and flew from Beijing to Irkutsk in less than 3 hours. Coming down the gangway and stepping onto the small airport, from the nose to the heart and lungs, are filled with cool cold air, only to find that "Siberia", which has been heard many times in the weather forecast, is not far away.

it is 300 kilometers from Irkutsk to Orhon Island west of the lake. The owner of the hotel on the island went to the city to buy. We hitched a ride with him and planned to go to the island overnight. The weather is not good along the way, the clouds are very thick, floating Lesser Snow, frame after frame passing outside the window is an endless larch forest. The autumn of Siberia is over, but I still look greedily at the scenery in front of me: there are no cattle and sheep, no people, only dark clouds away from the grass and rolls. At the extreme point of view, the mountains and the horizon, the earth, and the sky are high, and behind a skyline is another skyline.

at the end of the 7-hour drive is a ferry, where all vehicles need to stop and take a ferry to the island. By the time we got there, it was already dark. The boss stopped the car and lit a cigarette. It was cold outside, and we all huddled in the car, chatting without a sentence.

"if you drive 20 meters further, you will find the lake."

I sat up straight and looked forward. The headlights shone into the black hole, and I could see nothing but the boundless night.

there are few people on the island at this time, and we are at the front of the line. After waiting for a long time, a few more cars came, and it took a while for the boat to come. The car started slowly and drove up to the deck, in turn, everything was orderly and silent, like a needle into the sea.

until suddenly, I realized a sudden stillness. It's a kind of hallucinatory stillness that makes you feel like the whole world is sealed in a box, buried tens of thousands of feet underground.

A dense sense of security that strikes like drowsiness.

"where are we?"

"in the middle of the lake."

it's dark all around. My eyes were attracted by the flickering cigarette butts in the driver's seat. I only felt that the darkness was going to engulf the last glimmer of light.

it's like a dream that I can't wake up from.

II,

when you wake up, the world is far away. [1]

this is an isolated island. Live in isolation enough to make it a refuge for the shamans in North Asia. Abandoned villages were scattered on the island, and the wood on which the houses were built was blackened by Rain Water, with signs of being ravaged by the severe winter. The vast area of 730 square kilometers is home to only 1500 residents.

the sunrises and the fog clears. This is the deepest and oldest lake on the planet. It is the clearest blue eye in Siberia, Lake Baikal.

under the desolate and magnificent water, there are rare species that have not evolved for millions of years. Tens of millions of years ago, a continent floated from near Africa, raising the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, pushing up the Himalayas, and leaving an abyss of nine thousand meters in Siberia to the north. Years later, mud, rotten wood, and animal carcasses filled the deep rift into a crescent scar 1600 meters deep, 80 kilometers wide, and 600 kilometers long.

the Creator was eccentric, tamed, and poured into the 336 rivers around him, leaving only one river to flow out, and it took tens of millions of years to finally fill the abyss. From then on, 1/5 of the unfrozen fresh water on the surface is stored here and can be used by human beings for half a century. Even if all the rivers of the world were connected to Lake Baikal to drain it, it would take a whole year to drain it.

but the wound still hasn't healed. Every year, there are more than a thousand earthquakes here, and this area of water is expanding and tearing outward at the rate of several centimeters a year.

Lake Baikal, with tides, storms, and undercurrents, is a forming ocean.

there are the wildest winds and the quietest sea.

on a fallen tree trunk halfway up the hill, we sat down. The ground is covered with golden leaves, the wind is high, the sky is blue, and the warm autumn sun shines lazily on the unmelted first snow. In two months, Lake Baikal at the foot of the mountain will be frozen for four months. The man who lives alone in the Taga forest will hide in a warm wooden house. Outside the window was an ice-blue lake, the fire in the room was burning, the wine on the table was not finished, and the books on my knees were not finished. There is a cat under his feet, and the winter is still long.

I saw a short film two years ago: a man found an isolated cabin in the snow-capped mountains of Patagonia and raised a cat and a dog. Every morning, the man takes the dog out skiing, coming and going lightly in the vast mountains, while the cat waits in the warm home, waiting for their return.

many people in the world want to be Robinson, and some too many people want to banish themselves on an isolated island.

my friend recommended I see a German movie called Hidden Wall. It is about a woman who went to a cabin in the Austrian mountains for a holiday with a friend. She woke up in the morning and found that her friend had not returned all night, only to find herself trapped in an invisible wall.

inside the wall is a peach-like world, with grasslands and rivers, snow-capped mountains and forests, only human beings, only her. She was afraid of writing on the back of the yellowed old calendar on the dark, long winter afternoons, fending off fears from all directions, and did not want to sit back and be conquered by it.

at the end of the film, the animals that accompanied her died one by one. To protect her dog, she pulled the trigger on a human that appeared in insight for the first time in such a long time-- something she might have met inside the wall. The only one of the same kind at that moment, she completely bid farewell to the past, but also the real world.

at the beginning of the film, the woman and her friends drive into the mountains with a song: "give me love and freedom." Freedom is a journey, a journey towards yourself.

then her journey had just begun. And I don't know if she has any expectations for that wall.

IV,

to the northwest of Lake Baikal, there is an area called Tungus. More than a hundred years ago, the Ewenki people who lived there saw a dazzling light cut through the sky-a fireball brighter than the sun fell rapidly, splitting the sky in half, accompanied by a huge sonic boom, dark clouds rising from the sky. 80 million trees were instantly knocked down and uprooted, and the fire caused by the explosion razed more than 2000 square kilometers of forest to the ground. Then the black rain poured down, and night did not fall on 9000 miles of land for the next few days.

this is the largest impact recorded in human history, but no sign of a crater has been found. The impact is said to be 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. But at this time, there are still 37 years to go before the successful explosion of the world's first atomic bomb.

for more than a century, people have never stopped searching for the cause of this event-people speculating that the giant celestial body may be antimatter, cosmic dust, small black holes, or comets. Or maybe nature gets angry and detonates methane that has been deposited for years with spherical lightning. It was even suggested that it was a secret "death ray" experiment conducted by Nicholas Tesla in the United States.

humans are lucky enough that if the fireball had been delayed by 4 hours and 47 minutes, the whole of St. Petersburg would have been destroyed. Unfortunately, if we encounter similar events again, human beings may still have no ability to resist.

in the vast universe, our existence is a complete accident. But even so, the most popular of the many hypotheses is that more than a hundred years ago, an alien ship went to Lake Baikal in search of fresh water and accidentally crashed near Tungus.

Yes, human loneliness makes them willing to believe that it is the distant starlight that has been seen after hundreds of millions of light-years of solitude. And there is silence and echo in life.