ON Tuesday, 30
June, 1908, an extraordinary thing occurred a short distance north of today’s
BAM line. Just after breakfast time, a huge asteroid entered the Earth’s
atmosphere, triggering an explosion a thousand times more powerful than the
atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Known as the Tunguska Event, it burned
millions of trees to a crisp, turning an area about the size of Herefordshire
to scorched earth. And the end result? Almost nothing whatsoever. No-one was
killed. Indeed, few people noticed. By all accounts, no-one bothered to
investigate what had happened at Tunguska until almost a declare later.
This has nothing directly to do with the BAM, but it is
indicative of the near-cosmic vastness of Siberia; how its emptiness can
somehow make even apocalyptic explosions mute and irrelevant.
From Tynda, the most desolate leg of the railway stretches
eastwards. On a line of latitude between the Arctic Sea and the settled belt of
countryside along Russia’s Chinese border, there are almost no roads. BAM is
the only way of getting overland from east to west: a single corridor about
as wide as your arms span across some
1,500 miles of otherwise uninterrupted emptiness. From space, BAM appears as a
trail of faint lights across a sea of darkness.
We depart from Tynda, and the landscape outside the window
slips by with the repetitiveness of a broken record: birch forests, rivers,
meadows, a station where an old steam engine is parked (icicles growing in its
boiler)-and then more forests.
It wasn’t always this empty. These lands once heard the
footfalls of passing woolly mammoths, whose tusks are still regularly found
across the taiga. Before the Russians settled Siberia, nomadic tribes like the
Evenk roamed here, sleeping in birch-bark using twigs as markers. These days,
however, most Evenk people live in towns. Russia’s last woolly mammoth toppled
over with a thud more than 4,000 years ago-soon after the Great Pyramid of
Giza.
Every so often our train stops to let a freight services
pass by. There’s a rumble, a streak of bright lights, a cloud of powder-fine
snow suspended in the air – and then silence. Before long we are on our way
again.
In the Russian imagination, Siberia was a void that
encouraged horror stories. Legends spoke of tigers so bloodthirsty that they
would devour corpses in graveyards; of Siberian bears that would wet their fur
in rivers so they could extinguish campfires and gobble up pioneers in the
dark. It was said there were earthquakes so fierce they could make the earth
split open and the church bells ring of their own accord. But, in truth,
nothing is quite as frightening as Siberia’s emptiness: the idea of being lost
in the taiga with no sign of civilization, and no company but the vapour trails
of planes crossing the sky.
The afternoon sun lingers on the horizon as our train nears
the town of Novy Urgal – catching the underbelly of the clouds with pink
light-before the moon swings high into a star-flecked sky, lighting th
landscape with a phosphorescent glow. Before long the muffled snores from nearby
compartments blend with the arthritic creaking of the carriages. The line speed
on the BAM is slow, and trains clatter noisily over the rails throughout the
night. It is a sound that is easy to fall asleep to, perhaps because it closely
matches the tempo of a human heartbeat.
