EN ROUTE FOR D ACHES TAN. 251 



Caspian, and so, in spite of all the evil predictions 

 of the ' starost ' and his friends, my man and I, with 

 Allai and his brother, set our faces to the blue 

 mountains and jogged right merrily on our way 

 next morning. 



Our first resting-place \vas to b : the Armenian 

 mountain village of Gerdaoul. The road was 

 beautiful in the extreme, though it required much 

 beauty to make amends for its roughness. The 

 greater part of the way our course lay over the 

 bare bed of a mountain torrent, whose tortuous 

 windings were everywhere full of great boulders, 

 over which no beast could move at more than a 

 foot's pace. The hills, for the most part bare, were 

 boldly broken and ragged in outline ; at the top 

 were frequent thickets of small firs and pome- 

 granates, while every here and there small clumps 

 of the same flecked the white hillsides. After 

 surmounting this first range of hills, in which 

 small game seemed to swarm, we came upon a 

 table-land which separated us from the snow-Capped 

 range wherein our goal lay. On the very edge of 

 this table-land hangs the village of Gerdaoul. The 

 faces of the cottages composing it open out of the 

 hillside ; the roofs, mere white cones, rise out of the 

 table-land above. Far more imposing to the eye 

 appear numbers of haystacks, shaped like sugar- 

 loaves, perched on high wooden scaffolds to save 

 them from marauding buffaloes, or to give shelter 



