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ARMENIA AND THE NEAR EAST
1 92
cultivation, as soon as water was available. Some of it,
indeed, was cultivated without artificial irrigation, for wc saw
a good deal of land ploughed up for cornfields ; but most of
these fields looked very poor.
The road took a sudden turn, and wc found ourselves on
the edge of a steep descent, with Erivan on the plain right
below us. A wonderful sight ! Garden after garden, green
and luxuriant, and white houses shining among the trees on
the plain. It looked like a magnificent emerald jewel set in
the bare brownish-yellow desert slopes that enclose the town
on two sides. And behind it the wide, level Arax plain
stretched away like a calm sea to the south and west, until it
lost itself in the wilderness of Sardarabad. High above all,
Mount Ararat reared its vast bulk in the south, with its broad
gleaming snow-cap veiled in the clouds around its top, and
Little Ararat’s dark cone on the slope to the east, and the
high chain of mountains extending westwards from Ararat
like a blue wall at the back of the landscape. It is these
tremendous contrasts between plains and high mountains,
bare desert and luxuriant gardens that give to this scenery its
peculiar and distinctive character.
The mountain-side around us was utterly barren, not
a blade of grass to be seen anywhere, and descended sharply
to the outskirts of the town, where it ended in a stone wall.
But on the other side of the wall were rich orchards full of
big trees laden with fruit—apricots, still unripe peaches,
cherries and morello cherries, apples ; and beyond these a
continuous carpet of gardens and houses stretching away to
the other side of Erivan, where you crossed another stone
wall and found yourself in the desert again. This is what
artificial irrigation can conjure up in Armenia.
Wc drove down to our hotel in the town, and another
eventful expedition was at an end. Wc had motored through
more than half of Armenia, had seen its remarkably varied
scenery, and had formed a high opinion of the great possibilities
of development and progress in the valleys and mountains
of the damper part of the country in the north.
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