Three mystical stories that are told in the circles of tourists, hunters, fishermen and others, directly related to how a Russian person encounters the mysterious world of the first inhabitants of Siberia.
Cemetery
The Yenisei makes its way 290 kilometers through the ridges of the Western Sayan between Tuva and Khakassia. The river flows here in a narrow valley, in places - in a canyon only 100 meters wide. Here it is either dangerous or impossible to sail along the river. Even a boat with a powerful engine blows away on the rapids, especially on the Big Rapid. Here, near the mouth of the Kazyrsuk River, the river bed becomes 6 meters lower for 320 meters of the rapids, and the current speed reaches 8 meters per second.
It is impossible to sail along the river on this section, and to ride along a pack path is quite tolerable. The trail will leave the river many times, lead through rocky, fearful steep slopes, where the roar of the rapids of the river will almost subside in the distance, and only after many kilometers it will again lead to the Yenisei valley. No cart, no cart with wheels made of solid sections of logs will pass along such a road.
There are other trails, more comfortable, through Askiz and Abaza … In the place of these trails, the Russians quickly built a road along which one can ride on a cart, and after the war they made a convenient road through the Sayan Pass.
But here is the closest road, and the ancient man did not have to carry so much - there were enough pack horses. This path did not overgrow until very recently, before the era of aircraft and trucks.
In the place where the mighty river finally breaks through the ridges and spreads over the plain, the Russians built the village of Oznachennoe back in the 18th century. And above the Significant, near the modern village of Maina, there was an old cemetery a few kilometers away.
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Not only all the inhabitants of Tuva and Khakassia buried their people here. Travelers who died on the way, and not close to their homeland, inevitably, too, were buried in this place. Uyghur graves, Tibetan, Chinese, Mongolian, Oirot, Tangut, Sart - all of Central Asia is represented here, on this piece of land, inclined to the northeast, towards the Yenisei.
This cemetery had a special feature. Every night, exactly at midnight, a voice was heard in the cemetery. Where he was coming from was not clear. The man spoke, but no one would undertake to determine his age. The speaker might have been eighteen, but he might well have been sixty. Some disembodied, rustling voice, as if it were not a living being. A quiet voice impassively pronounced something like: "Teki mordo sella poki teva." At least I heard just such combinations of sounds.
All the locals were well aware of this voice. Archaeologists also knew, and they always brought another newcomer to the cemetery. When you walk in a large group of people, it's not scary. And yet it can be creepy when impassive, rustling words sound over the sleeping plains, under the overhanging masses of ridges.
The voice was recorded on a tape recorder, they tried to define the language, the words to understand, guess, decipher … to make it understandable in one word. Many times have tried to determine where the sound is coming from. All, of course, to no avail. No one recognized the source of the sound, or what the amazing voice spoke, and in what language. And he will never know, because the cemetery was flooded in 1980 when filling the bed of the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP. I was one of the last people to hear this voice … and even then the water was already approaching the cemetery.
The cemetery was flooded when filling the bed of the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP
The unknown voice itself, pronouncing an incomprehensible phrase in "fish tongue", reminded many, of course, something of the Strugatsky brothers - remember the Voice of the Void from "Noon, XXII century"? Gorbovsky makes an impression on Mike, talks about the Voice … A fairy tale about a future that won't exist, remember?
“There is such an interesting effect … If you turn on the on-board receiver for autotuning, sooner or later it will tune into a strange transmission. A voice is heard, calm and indifferent, and repeats the same phrase in fish tongue. I have heard it, and many have heard it, but few tell it. It's not very pleasant to remember. After all, the distance to the Earth is unimaginable. The ether is empty - there is not even interference, only faint rustles. And suddenly this voice is heard …"
So, I could name an archaeologist who worked in these places in the early 1960s and knew Arkady Strugatsky. The plots in the works of great writers are interestingly transformed!
Mountain
And in the south of Khakassia there is a mountain that cannot be reached. Khakassia is not such a big country, and no matter what mountain you name, it is not at all difficult to climb it and catch it - it’s not that mountain at all!
Moreover, this legend was told to me by city intellectuals, and not at all by local residents who are well acquainted with the mountain.
The legend is this: once the enemies attacked Khakassia. I also did not manage to find out who these enemies were: they were Huns, Kyrgyz or Uighurs. Enemies, and that's it! The enemy army crossed the mountains and, before a decisive battle, settled on the mountain in order to start the decisive part of the invasion tomorrow, to strike at Khakassia itself.
But then the land itself intervened, helping those who live on it. No matter how many enemies galloped down the mountain, they could not move far from the top. And no matter how many Khakases galloped at the enemies, they also could not approach them. So the enemy army remained forever on the mountain; the enemies ate their horses, ate everything they could, and died.
Their bones and everything that the enemies brought with them lies there to this day. And since then it has been impossible to climb the mountain. You can go for hours, days, even a few weeks. The mountain will be perfectly visible, but you can neither come nor come to it.
This plot was also well known to Strugatsky, but was used without any patriotic pathos. The Strugatsky brothers included this plot in the "Tale of the Troika" - do you remember, beekeeper Filofey? Many subjects of Siberian myths were well known to Strugatsky. Another thing is that the Strugatskys themselves never mentioned this in a single word.
Give me salt
This story took place at the very end of the last century, on one of the paths leading from Abaza to the depths of the Sayan Mountains, to loaches and squirrels - a place where there is already bare - no forest and where everything is white with snow. There, in the poor deserted mountains, the Tofalars roamed with their herds of deer. Of everything that is in the big world and is not in their mountains, the Tofalars needed two things: salt and iron.
The merchant, whose name was lost in time, traded with the Tofalars, brought them iron needles, awls, knives, axes. Every year I brought two bags of salt, which were enough for the Tofalars.
The merchant had a daughter, whose Christian name she remembered: Irina. Perhaps the merchant himself was unbaptized, and therefore the name was forgotten; but he christened his daughter, and the girl learned to read and write in Russian. From this it already follows that the merchant was a reasonable man and modern for his time, because he himself belonged to a society in which a woman is a kind of livestock, but was preparing a daughter for life in a completely different world.
Having turned from the main road onto a pack path, the merchant and his daughter had to walk for three days, lead a horse loaded with everything necessary with them by the reins, and gradually rise to the squirrels, to the agreed place. Why the merchant took his daughter with him, whether it was the first time or was repeated every year - history is silent.
At the end of the first day of the journey, the merchant and his daughter stopped in a hut specially built for those who are passing and passing. For the hut, which was used only a few times a year, in the warm season, they did not even cut down the forest. They drove poles into the ground, braided them with vines; one wall was made higher than the other, so that rain would flow from the sloping roof and snow would not accumulate. All this was coated with clay, and the first person who passed along the path renewed this coating. A key was beating in front of the hut; those walking along the path dug a hole where water accumulated. A hearth was made here.
It would seem, who needed this beggarly forest hut, clearly not a very rich merchant and his teenage daughter? But from the forest they were watched by eyes, for whose owners all this - a horse, food supplies, goods for exchange - could become a huge wealth. Three escaped convicts went into the forest, huddled away from the authorities, from the roads on which they could be looked for.
They achieved this, no words - no one found three fugitives. But life in a remote taiga is an amateur's pleasure; and if the “amateur” does not know how to hunt, fish, walk without roads at all; if he does not have suitable clothes and shoes, it is very bad business.
Even having found a hut, the fugitive criminals did not solve all their problems. Live in this hut? But … what? And you can live in it only until the first frost. Build a real hut? You need tools, you need skill. And for wintering - food.
I will add that all three of the robbers were Russians - this circumstance was emphasized several times.
The starving robbers left for the taiga a few minutes before the appearance of the merchant and his daughter: they barely had time to trample the fire, destroy the traces of their stay. The rest, I suppose, is clear … at least mostly. As with many other cases, there are two similar versions of the event.
According to one version, the robbers killed and robbed both of them, and the corpses were dismembered and thrown into the forest to be devoured by animals.
According to another, they killed the father, and tied the daughter and, leaving, everyone laughed at her - they say, give me more salt! Leaving, they even showed humanism - they untied the girl, did not begin to destroy. Humanism, of course, is relative: the girl was left alone in the middle of a deaf taiga, in a full day of crossing from the road, next to her father's corpse. The girl went mad from the experience; completely helpless, she ran around the hut until she died of hunger and loss of strength.
The second version, frankly, explains everything further much better. Because no merchant appears in this place and does not complicate the life of travelers. But if you want to stop at this convenient dry patch, in a dilapidated shack, in the flame of your fire ("behind the fire" - others believe), it is your daughter who appears. The jets of flame form a slender maiden figure, dressed in a dress with a national ornament, torn in many places, with half-Asian features.
- Give me salt! - the fiery girl stretches out her hand to the seated one.
He shies away, moves aside as he can. And the hand, like a rubber one, stretches after him, lengthens by itself.
- Give me salt!
This is "give salt!" will repeat until those sitting around the fire in a panic run away.
When I asked how far a hand could reach, the informants could not answer with any certainty. No one doubted that it was “far away,” but they did not have more data. What happens if a girl's hand touches someone, opinions fell apart. Some thought that the one touched by the girl would die immediately. Others believed that there would be a severe burn, and the person could even burn if he did not run away. Still others seriously assumed that the girl was lonely, that if she caught someone, then in order to take that person as her husband.
You can check it quite simply. It is necessary to turn onto the second footpath to the left of the road leading from Abaza to the Sayan pass and further to Tuva, and walk about 30 kilometers by paths. The ruins of a hut, a fireplace in the hearth, lined with flagstone, and a hole filled with water from a spring have survived to this day. Those interested can spend the night there and put on any experiment.
Andrey Burovsky, writer, candidate of historical sciences