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156 ARMENIA AND THE NEAR EAST
horses of West Norway ; they are apt to be rather thin and
bony, but as saddle-horses are well-built, swift, and good
stayers. They are by no means cheap either, costing two or
even three hundred roubles for a fairly good animal. The
officer of the frontier post was mounted on a powerful and
handsome stallion, but it had cost two thousand roubles.
He had ridden forty kilometres over from his post in the
morning, and was going to ride the same animal back when
he parted from us in the afternoon.
We rode to the river. It was running here through a
narrow canyon, possibly 500 metres wide and 60 metres
deep, which it had cut through layers of lava and basalt.
Above the place where we were standing, and where the
canyon was narrowest, the river-bed broadened out into a
wide valley, with even, sloping sides. According to the plan
previously worked out a dam 53 metres high was to be
built across the canyon at this point, thus converting the
valley above into a big lake which would serve as a good
reservoir. In order to convey the water by a canal to the
Sardarabad plain a tunnel would have to be made through
the mountain at a level of about 20 metres below the surface
of the lake, and the length of this tunnel would have to be
about 2 kilometres.
Our experienced expert, Mr. Dupuis, held that this plan
could be carried out, but thought that a more satisfactory
solution of the problem could be found. To build a dam over
50 metres high would in any case be a big and costly under
taking; and in the present instance the basalt and lava rock
composing the sides of the canyon was cracked, broken, and
porous, so that it would be hard work to make it sufficiently
watertight to stand the pressure of such a mass of water.
Moreover, accidents might happen with a dam of this size ;
the dam might spring a leak, or be broken through, for
instance, by human agency in wartime, or by an earthquake ;
the water would then escape and the reservoir run dry. To
repair the dam sufficiently for the water to be raised once more
to the height of the tunnel would certainly take years, and
during that time all the people who had cultivated the Sardara
bad plain and were dependent upon the water from the canal
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