430 
CONSULAR EXPERIENCES IN TURKEY. 
Description 
of Van. 
a Kaimakan there at this my first visit and he bore a good reputation, 
but Bitlis was later made into a separate vilayet and a Yali arrived 
against whom there quickly came many complaints. The American 
missionaries had a station here and showed me much hospitality and 
kindness. 
On the 11th August I left Bitlis for Van. Ascending the valley for 
a short time, we then bore off to the right in a north-easterly direction 
till in the afternoon we reached the crest of the hills bordering the 
Lake of Van on the south, and I obtained my first sight of that beauti¬ 
ful sheet of water. The view was indeed lovely. We stood on a 
narrow ridge from which rugged slopes covered with scrub oak dropped 
several hundred feet to the blue waters, dancing and sparkling in the 
sun. To the left was the huge crater of the Nimroud Dagh, and to 
the right of it on the northern shore rose for 7000 feet the symmetrical 
cone of the Sipan Dagh, capped with whitest snow. To the east, in the 
direction in which we were going, stretched the ridges on which we 
were standing, rising and falling and throwing out buttresses into the 
lake till the mass of the Pelo Dagh blocked the further view. From this 
point we rode parallel to the lake, sometimes on its shore, sometimes 
behind the coast ridge, passing several villages, near two of which we 
encamped for two nights and the third day reached a monastery, over 
which presides the Oatholicos of Aglitamar, one of the leading Armenian 
ecclesiastics. These monks also possess a monastery on the little 
island of Aghtamar, containing a curious old church with strange 
figures carved in bands on the outer walls. 
The next day I reached Van, having been as usual met by deputations 
on the way and was received at the house of the Armenian Bishop. 
Van is a picturesque place. The nucleus is an old walled town 
nestling at the foot of the isolated limestone rock on which stands the 
castle. The old town contains the business quarters, bazaars, mosques 
and Government offices, but the bulk of the population live in an ex¬ 
tensive suburb called the gardens, which extends to the eastward 
for considerably over a mile towards the Warak Dagh, a rugged 
mountain of igneous rock that rises some 5000 feet above the level of 
the lake. In these gardens I found that the Pasha had engaged a 
house for me, and Major Kamsaragan, the Russian Vice-Consul, 
whom I had met at Erzeroum, had a house just across the street. 
On the face of the Castle Rock is a trilingual inscription in cuneiform 
character cut there by Xerxes, and on other parts of this rock and 
others in the neighbourhood are several other inscriptions in the same 
character, but in a different language, and I do not know whether 
these have yet been satisfactorily deciphered. On some steep rocks 
north-east of the town stand ruined mounds of unburnt brick, the 
relics of a very ancient city. These ruins were excavated by Mr. 
Rassam and myself on the part of the British Museum. They had 
been previously considerably ransacked by the natives in search of 
building stone and what else they could find, but we discovered a 
number of bronze shields covered with embossed images of lions and 
bulls and surrounded by cuneiform inscriptions. Other bronze objects 
