Our companions started on their journey, while we with our saddles made our way to a neighbouring village in which the horses were to be found. We were accompanied by the Pristav's man, a sinister-looking villain; the saddles followed on a bullock cart. But at a winding of the path, just after leaving the settlement, the wheels sank into an abysmal depth of mud. I have no doubt that this incident is of daily occurrence, and that neither village would entertain the notion of making a road. The horses were on the meadows; their owners refused to catch them, and we were obliged to essay the task ourselves. But in this open country they eluded all our efforts; we were obliged to return without attaining our end. The Pristav received our maledictions with equanimity, and we were reduced to the tame expedient of two sorry ponies, which were only equal to carrying us to the nearest considerable station on the road to Erivan. How poor in resources is this magnificent country! what a curse appears to lie on these fertile lands! Our Pristav had the charge of thirty-six villages, of which six were inhabited by Persian Tartars and the remainder by a population of his own race. His district extended from Bash Abaran to Ashtarak; yet he told us that in the whole of this considerable region there did not exist a single school. Baffled of our purpose, we mounted our ponies and took to the road to Erivan, two solitary figures in the lonely waste. The provincial capital was over thirty-five miles distant, and it was already half-past four o'clock. The prospect over the plain, which I have just described, is so far deceptive that you under-rate the extension of these stony basal slopes. This mistaken estimate is due in part to the position of the hill of Karniarch, which blocks the view towards the south-east. To gain Erivan, you are obliged to round the base of that elevation; nor, in that direction, do the rocky inclines die away in the level campagna before you have reached the gardens of the town. The base of Alagöz appears to mingle with the base of the volcanic masses which line the inner edges of the border range; mile after mile you cross a bleak and boulder-strewn country which sweeps into the plain. To add to our impression of the complete forlornness of this region, a violent storm arose. The immense expanse of heaven was filled with driving clouds, riven by lightning; the torrents roared, and the blast bent the stunted bushes which rise along their margin among the rocks. We were reminded of the famous night upon the Brocken, as our tired ponies tottered forward into the blinding rain. Shelter there was none; it was a case of struggling onwards and taking pleasure in the elemental war. And the road! was there ever outside of Persia such a strange caricature of a road? It wound like a snake, avoiding every hillock; the traffic made short cuts from bend to bend. There were bridges broken in the back with a ford alongside them; there