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ARMENIA AND THE NEAR EAST
110
Evidently the idea was that some of the bråkes were on by
mistake.
Meanwhile tea was ready, and breakfast was served in the
saloon. Then the tram began to move on again ; and before
long wc were on a steady decline where it could go full speed.
Wc were going southward along the east side of the river
Arpa-chai, which was rushing along the bottom of a deep
channel beneath us, excavated out of the undulating plain.
This channel has high, steep sides cut out of horizontal layers
of basalt and lava, which may have overflowed from the
surrounding volcanoes. On our left, in the east, was the
vast mountain named Alagoz, 4,095 metres above sea-level,
or 2,500 metres above ourselves ; and on the opposite side
of the plain, in the west, rose the volcanic cones of the Alaja
Mountains against the blue sky.
The river seemed to contain enough water, at any rate now,
to irrigate large areas ; there was a tributary, too, coming
from the north-west in another cutting through the plain ;
and farther to the south was quite a large river, very much
like the Arpa-chai, which turned out to be the Kars-chai, that
flows past the fortress of Kars in the west and receives a
tributary from the Chaldir Gol Lake (1,988 metres above sea
level) up in the mountains to the north-west, near the high
peak Kisir Dagh (3,192 metres). The sources of the Kars
river are in the same mountain district as those of the Kura.
The country looked stony and none too promising on our
side of the Arpa-chai. On the other side it was greener, but
that was Turkey ; for the river forms the boundary. There
were some villages over there, but these seemed to be largely
deserted. They used to be Armenian, but the inhabitants
fled to this side during the war, when the country fell into
the hands of the Turks. It is a pity that such fertile lands
should lic unused.
Beneath a mountain-ridge to the west, on the other side of
the river, wc could make out some ruins. These were Ani,
" the town of a thousand and one churches," once the magnifi
cent capital of Armenia in the tenth and eleventh centuries,
where the Armenian Bagratid kings resided during the most
glorious period of Armenia’s history in the Middle Ages. In
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