624 
BASALTIC VALLEY. 
October 26th. — Not to lose time, I set off this morning at a 
very early hour, with a rather strong escort, into the wilds of 
the mountains. We crossed the main road north-east of the 
city; and keeping in that direction, ascended gradually for 
nearly four hours. During this time we passed one or two 
tenantless villages, the inhabitants not having yet returned from 
their summer expeditions. At the termination of the fourth 
hour we struck into the boldest and most extraordinary kind of 
valley I ever beheld. On the first view I might have supposed 
it the ruins of some vast city of the Titans in the antediluvian 
world; so castled, pillared, and overturned, appeared its gigantic 
details. The immense perpendicular heights, shattered and 
projecting in every variety of form, press in, between their nearly 
meeting bases, the narrow but rapidly pouring stream of the 
Gurney; and on one of the huge overhanging rocks, once stood 
the castellated palace of Tiridates, or, as the natives call it, the 
Tackt-i-Tiridate: its remains appearing in real decay, amongst 
the vast assemblage of rocky masses, so formed as to be mistaken 
for ruins.* The enormous cliff projections on which its towers 
have stood, are for the most part composed of basaltic columns ; 
and the whole chain of the mountains on each side the valley, 
stretching north-east to the source of the river in the lake, are 
broken and cragged with the same. Their strata appear in every 
possible direction. Some rise from the earth in extraordinary 
serpent-like shapes, twining together, or shooting out from each 
other in a hundred radiated points ; others, again, are perfectly per¬ 
pendicular, forming vast, and sublimely pillared walls ; in the next 
cliff we find them horizontal, or traversing each other obliquely j 
* See Plate LXXXV. 
