A country of elevated uplands, a natural carpet of springy turf, broken here and there by patches of cultivation which struggle upwards from the plainer levels to the hillsides. Grey lights descending from a grey heaven upon a surface swelling and falling like the sea. In the east the near reliefs of the mountains of the meridional border, their base checkered with plots of fallow and stubble, their summits veiled with cloud. At their foot the lake and marsh of Madatapa, with the Russian village of Troitskoy upon its shore. In the west the vague downs, rising to a distant horizon of loftier shapes, similar to themselves. Such were the opening phases of the scene through which we passed to the scarcely perceptible water-parting between the Araxes and the Kur. After less than an hour's drive from Efremovka we could see the village of Korakhbur (Armenian Catholic) on the hillside, about a mile away on our left hand; on our right was an Armenian hamlet, which was named to us Jaila; both are situated in the southern watershed. The height of the parting between the basins, at the point where we crossed it, is placed by the Russian map at 6777 feet, a figure which, if it errs, is below the truth. And now for the first time were disclosed the gleaming peaks which we had seen from Abul--beyond a line of hummock hills the group of snowy teeth which break the horizontal outline of Alagöz. Tazaken, a Turkish settlement; Khancharli, a large village of Armenian Catholics, were rapidly left behind. The landscape opened to a lofty range of swelling shapes and rounded outlines on the western margin of the plain. They were the mountains about Lake Chaldir; the declining sun was about to touch them from behind a shroud of mist. Sheets of light were thrown upon those distant opaline masses as upon the coast of a hazy sea. At a quarter to six--we had left Efremovka at 4.20--we were winding between the two Shishtapas, on our right the Turkish Shishtapa, washed by the young stream of the Arpa; the Armenian Shishtapa further away on our left. At six o'clock we crossed a bridge which spans a tributary of the Arpa, coming from the east. The confluence takes place some hundred yards below the bridge, and the name of the tributary was given to us as Kizil-Goch (the red lamb). It is a solid stone bridge with a curious stone ornament; on the further side you rise to an eminence which overlooks the Arpa, and upon which the lonely post station of Shishtapa is built.