1 GO ARARAT. 



After the first doze I made an attempt to follow my 

 companions, but soon found it useless ; so I resigned 

 myself to fate, and lay down, now in one nook of the 

 rocks, now in another, sometimes dreaming oddly, as one 

 does in odd places, sometimes gazing drowsily over the 

 top of Little Ararat (12,800 feet) into Persia, or over the 

 Kara Dagh ranges to the white line of the Eastern 

 Caucasus. The sun got very hot, and my head ached 

 horribly ; so I scrambled round the rocks to a shaded shelf, 

 whence I could see far into Kurdistan, a region of snowy 

 mountains and bare valleys. A streak below me was the 

 infant Euphrates, but I did not feel much the better 

 for seeing it. Of the Garden of Eden no tradition seems 

 to linger even in this land of old stories, and if these 

 baiTcn hills were ever clothed by the groves of the earthly 

 Paradise, the change has been complete indeed. My state 

 of mind at the time scarcely made me a fair judge of the 

 view, but I will try to give the impression it produced upon 

 me, as compared with European mountain panoramas. 

 Most people have seen in a sculptor's studio a block of 

 marble hewn down to the rough outline of the group 

 which he has it in his mind to produce. From a dis- 

 tance the eye catches a certain grandeur of effect which 

 closer inspection destroys, by revealing that the parts are 

 in themselves but rough and shapeless masses. So it is 

 with these mountains of Kurdistan. On them the great 

 sculptor, Nature, seems to have ' tried her prentice hand ' 

 before she had learnt how to chisel out with her graving- 

 tools, frost and heat, the torrent and the glacier, those 

 exquisite outlines of peak and valley which are a dis- 

 tinguishing feature of the Alps and the Caucasus. The 

 first impression I received was, — what a wilderness of 

 mountains ! — in every direction nothing met the eye but 

 snowy masses, lying in heaps instead of ranges. The 



