174 
RUINS OF ANNI. 
The pillars, and all ornamental parts of the building, were as 
sharp and fresh, as if but the erection of yesterday. Indeed, 
every where, time seemed to have dealt more mercifully with 
this city, than the hand of man. War had broken down its 
bulwarks; made its palaces, churches, and dwelling places, 
tenantless ; and, in a thousand ways, left its desolating marks. 
But where time alone might be expected to act, or with its 
destroying auxiliaries, the influences of weather, there we found 
few symptoms of decay. Fine, and even brilliant mosaic, exe¬ 
cuted with more or less precision, spreads itself over the city; 
and, in general, the form of the cross appears to be the root 
whence all the various patterns spring. Houses, churches, 
towers, embattled walls, every structure, high or low, partake 
the prevailing taste; and, on all, we see the holy insignia carved, 
large or small, in black stone. Besides these emblems, I found 
long inscriptions, cut in the old Armenian character, over the 
principal entrances of the churches; and some of them I 
should have transmitted to paper, had not the evening been 
drawing on, and with it a cold so intense as to disable me from 
holding my pencil. But, had it been otherwise, the impatience 
of my escort to be gone, would not have allowed me to trace a 
line. Notwithstanding their numbers, and their courage, it was 
probable that, under dusk, they might be surprised by a greater 
force, of equal determination; banditti, issuing from the 
dark and tomb-like heaps of the city, where, in the daylight, 
appeared only silence and desolation. The disposition of many 
of the ruins, by their closeness and gloom, rendered them apt 
places for the lurking-holes of these sanguinary freebooters ; 
like most Asiatic cities, the streets appearing to have been not 
more than from twelve to fourteen feet wide. The generality of 
