support a flourishing rose-growing 

 industry, irrigated by a complex system 

 of tunnels and covered, stone-lined 

 channels that date back thousands of 

 years. And in the date-producing Ziz 

 Valley in Morocco's High Atlas moun- 

 tains, women pass along traditional 

 knowledge about how best to irrigate 

 fields, how to select the best seeds for 

 planting, and what times are best to plant 

 and harvest for greatest yields. 



What works in the arid world, ac- 

 cording to the reports in Dry — what 

 seems to keep traditional societies 

 in parched lands both healthy and 

 productive at a modest level — is a 

 combination of ancient methods and 

 appropriate new technologies. None 

 of the places highlighted in the book 

 seem destined to become the next Las 

 Vegas or Dubai — but who would wish 

 for that? 



Sacred Sea: A Journey 

 to Lake Baikal 

 by Peter Thomson 

 Oxford University Press; $29.95 



Siberia's Lake Baikal, like so much 

 that is Russian, is riddled with con- 

 tradictions. Halfway between the Urals 

 and the Pacific, the lake is so remote 

 that few Russians have seen its shores, 

 even though they regard it with a mystic 



reverence far surpassing the American 

 devotion to Yellowstone or the Grand 

 Canyon. As for non-Russians, few 

 foreigners appreciate Baikal's unique- 

 ness — if they know of its existence at 

 all. Yet Baikal surely ranks among the 

 greatest natural wonders of the world. 

 Its crescent-shaped basin, though out- 

 ranked in surface area by Lake Superior 

 and a few other bodies of water, is far 

 deeper and far greater in capacity than 

 any other lake: Baikal, by itself, holds a 

 fifth all the freshwater on Earth. 



Formed 25 million years ago, the 

 "blue eye of Siberia" is thousands of 

 times older than the Great Lakes. And 

 because Baikal is so isolated, a kind of 

 watery analogue to Australia or New 

 Zealand, its aquatic ecosystem has 

 evolved in unique directions. Among 

 more than twenty-five species of fish 

 that live exclusively in the lake, the most 

 abundant are weird creatures called golo- 

 myankas, whose bodies are translucent. 

 No more than a foot long, they swim 

 with their heads up, like seahorses, and 

 bear their young live. The lake is even 

 home to a singular species of mammal, 

 the nerpa, the world's only freshwater 

 seal, which can spend as long as three- 

 quarters of an hour in the frigid depths 

 before coming up for air. 



What makes Baikal even more re- 

 markable is the purity of its water. No 



Nerpas, freshwater seals, lounge on Lake Baikal's shore. 



November 2007 naiurai iiimhuv 69 



New from 

 Thames & Hudson 



Robert Huxley, ed. 



$39.95 / 304 pages / 198 illus. 



1 the red 



volcanoes 



vtTWgEHI MOIIMAINSOI riRr 



G. Brad Lewis et al. 



$34.95 / 144 pages / 126 illus. 



Brian M. Fagan, ed. 



$40.00 / 256 pages / 295 illus. 



Thames & Hudson 



thamesandh udsonusa.com 



