A lake of love

Unlikely life-forms

The Arctic salmon — actually, silvery Siberian peled or northern whitefish that aren't technically salmon — float like pale ghosts through otherworldly waters that had contained only emptiness for millions of years. These "Queens of Cold-Water Fish", as they're locally called, glide like pallid angels, fluttering around a netherworld they were never meant to populate.

Sayram was too cold and isolated — amputated from every stream where life swam — for fish to arrive naturally, let alone survive or even thrive.

Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) official Lin Zexu, who's best known for destroying mass quantities of opium, recounted his 1840s banishment to the region in his book, Journey Into Exile: "(Sayram Lake) has never had boats, nor has it been a source for fish such as carp. The water is undrinkable, and drinking it makes your hands and feet weary due to the coldness of the snowmelt."

However, other Qing records and centuries-old oral history whisper tales of an aquatic cryptid that resurfaced in 2007, when competitors in the Xinjiang Sayram Cycling Race claimed to see what appeared to be a 10-meter-long creature writhing roughly 100 meters offshore. It seemed to swim for 50 meters before vanishing. Photos show what some people think are three black dorsal ridges but, as is common with such claims, the images are too blurry to confirm.

This mass sighting prompted experts to conduct sonar scans that failed to detect any large beasts but did find new microbial communities. So, the "monster" still served as an unintentional guide who led humans to find unknown life lurking in the deep.

A common theory is that the sightings were actually of taimen — colloquially called "dinosaur trout" because of their hulking statures — although none are known to live in the lake.

Again, the lake instinctively repels inhabitation by finned organisms.

The first fish — over 30 species — were introduced by experts in the 1960s. They died immediately.

Scientists kept trying. And the fish kept dying.

That was until 1998, when peled whitefish endemic to Russia's Arctic Ocean drainage basins were transplanted and survived.

Today, they're sold in high-end restaurants, and their caviar is exported to Europe. They're prized not only for their flavor but also nutrition. They contain more protein — around 19 percent — and unsaturated fatty acids than most farmed fish.

Visitors can try to hook one of these improbable catches themselves or dine on them in mobile cabins near the shoreline.

They're not just a meal, but a story of the impossible come true, a scientific triumph that swims alongside a lake monster that lives in mystery.

Sayram is a place where the landscape is not just what it is but what we wish it to be.

It's a mathematician, a mythmaker and a magician. It's a love letter written in numbers, a dragon's frozen breath and a sacred destination. It's a witness, a test, a promise, an experiment, a storybook, an equation and a mirror reflecting not just the sky above but the deep desires of our hearts — especially for true love.