It must not be supposed that these characteristics of the topography are prominent in the landscape. They are lost in the folds of the plain and overpowered by the scale of their surroundings. Look where you will, you have around you the floor of a sea-like expanse, bounded at immense intervals by mountainous coasts. In the east it is the indented outline of the range on the side of Georgia, curving round from a south-easterly into a due meridional direction as it approaches the point of intersection with Alagöz. From that point the great volcano composes a side of the frame, inclining a little south of an east-west line. It forms a magnificent object as seen from Alexandropol, high in the sky, yet with scarcely perceptible gradient in the profile on either side of the core of precipitous peaks. You follow its train declining into the vague spaces of the west, where the bulging convexities become broken into hummock forms. The greatest breadth of the plain, as it appears to the eye, would be measured from the wall of the range which intersects with Alagöz to a distant mass of mountain in the south-west. That vague boundary probably belongs to one of the elevations on the plateau which extends between Kars and the Araxes. Between it and the skirts of the volcano there is a broad depression in the outlines, giving passage to the Arpa Chai. The misty prospects on the west and north-west did not reveal during the course of our stay the limits of the level surface in those directions.