Panorama Photo

Same location as N.8261.
Same angle (360°) and number of shots (21) as there.
On the other hand, same quotation as in N.8227 - I mean, drawn from the same book. This is because eight km away from the lake, on the road to the Bairam Davaa (=pass), there is a rich site of "kurgany" - the typical Central Asian tumuli marking important burial places.
"Two and a half millennia ago Herodotus described the Scythian royal burials in intimate detail, from the forty-day funerary journey around the dead king's dominion to the narcotic vapour-tents where the mourners howled with joy. [...] Beside the king lay strangled members of his household, with a dead concubine and many horses. Around his kurgan rode an eerie cavalry, fifty strong: its horses and men had been disembowelled and impaled on stakes and wheels, their feet and hooves never touching the ground.
[...] The rain which seeped down into the crypts, or coursed along the passage left by contemporary robbers (who took only gold), froze in the cold rooms, and sealed them under a lens of ice. [...] Experts could tell the season of burial by the contents of the horses' intestines [...] they could diagnose osteoporosis and toothache in the humans, and count their battle-wounds."
Today, luckily, nothing in this peaceful place leads to imagine stories like these...
Larger version: www.panoramio.com/photo/72127200