At Kaindy, in the Tian Shan of southeastern Kazakhstan, a forest drowned more than a hundred years ago and never fell over. A landslide dammed the gorge, the water rose over a stand of Schrenk's spruce, and the trees died standing. They are still there: bleached poles rising out of clear water, bare above the surface and whole beneath it. The lake barely tops six degrees even in August, too cold for the wood to rot, so on a calm day you can pick out the branches down in the dark. Before the wind wakes, the surface goes to glass and doubles every trunk. The same spruce still covers the slopes above, so the poles in the water and the forest over them are one tree, a century apart. In winter the lake freezes with the trunks locked in it, and divers go under the ice into water clear past twenty-five metres.
The Kolsai lakes step up the next valley, three of them, from spruce forest toward the frontier. The lowest is the largest and the easiest to reach from Saty village, with boats out on dark green water. It holds the slopes and the peaks upside down until the first breeze of the day breaks it. A trail climbs through the trees to the middle lake, two or three hours on foot or on a horse you hire in the village, and to the upper lake beyond it. Beyond it the path climbs to a pass at 3,278 metres on the Kyrgyz border, and puts Issyk-Kul far below you. By late September the aspens and birches around the water burn gold against the black-green spruce, and the water gives them back to you doubled. The signs at Kaindy still credit the earthquake of 1911 for the landslide. The trees do not: their last growth rings stop around 1888, and young spruce was already rooting in the debris by 1898.