ELBORUS, AND THE ARK. 
127 
ruins of an ancient fort, church, and houses ; and about two 
miles further from this side of the city, stand the remains of 
another sacred edifice of old times, on the summit of a hill so 
high, that it commands the most extensive view to be found 
any where in the environs of Tiflis. From one side it embraces 
the city, with its citadel, churches, and gardens ; on the other 
to the north, the" windings of the Kur, through the varied shores 
of the valley and plain ; and takes, also into the same wide 
landscape, not only the whole chain of mountains from the pro¬ 
vince of Kahetia to Kasibeck, but their tremendous summits, 
pile above pile, as far as the eye can reach to the north-west, 
till all are crowned by the pale and cloud-encircled head of 
f 
Elborus. A Russian officer, who measured this last-named 
mountain, calculates it to be sixteen thousand seven hundred 
feet above the level of the sea. 
There is a tradition here, that, during the subsiding of the 
deluge, the ark of Noah, while floating over these mountains 
in the direction of Ararat its place of final rest, it smote the 
head of Elborus with its keel, and the cleft it made in the moun¬ 
tain has remained ever since. To give any colour of feasibility 
to the legend, it had better have represented that the ark struck 
off the top of the one mountain in its passage to the other ; for, 
otherwise, Elborus, towering as it is, being at present much 
lower than Ararat, it could not have been touched at all by the 
sacred vessel floating towards so much higher a region. But 
this oral remembrance of some junction having taken place 
between Elborus and the earliest personages of Holy Writ, is not 
the only honour of the kind attached to the history of this 
celebrated mountain. Heathen traditions, and classical writers 
affirm, that Elborus was the huge and savage rock of the 
