PROCEEDINGS OP THE COTTESWOLD CLUB 167 



tree." Close against it. and almost buried in the root was 

 a stone slab, completely covered with wax, and black with 

 the smoke of tapers burned for generations ! Here then 

 we were in the presence of such an oak as had been 

 worshipped in some of the " high places " in ancient days, 

 and the worship of which, thinly veiled by the name of 

 Christianity, was going on yet ; and of the stone that was 

 probably an object of adoration for many generations 

 earlier still : all three eras overlapping, so to say, and 

 co-existent. 



Few spots could be more calculated to excite the 

 imagination. From the summit above us, five thousand 

 five hundred feet in height, we look westward over a wild 

 abyss of Armenian mountains to a great volcanic barrier, 

 thirty or forty miles in length, and in one part eleven 

 thousand feet high, which shuts in the Lake of Goktcha. 

 This lake is a thousand feet higher than the summit we 

 stand on : a storm-beaten and desolate sea, the thunder of 

 whose billows dashing against the tremendous cliffs, is 

 often heard for twenty versts away in the valleys below. 



In the Kedabek Valley we had our first opportunity of 

 examining the Asiatic turbine, which as a mill-wheel is 

 universal in the Caucasus. In all that relates to hydraulics, 

 Asia has an incontestable lead in antiquity. This is partly 

 due to the necessity which makes irrigation a condition 

 of cultivation over so large a portion of the continent : 

 India, Turkestan, Persia, for example. Palmyra we now 

 know to have been supplied with water from an under- 

 ground canal across the desert ; and the vast earthworks 

 that remain in Mesopotamia give us some idea of the scale 

 on which the canals were made from the Tigris and 

 Euphrates. My friend Col. Holland, who preceded Gen. 

 Gordon in China, tells me that the embankments in that 

 Empire surpass the whole work of the railways in Europe ; 

 while the light bamboo water-wheel employed there for irri- 

 gation, though probably in use for ages, is, I venture to say. 



