but the wretched pack-horses, upon which our tents had been loaded, were lagging several hours behind. We ourselves had reached camp at six o'clock; it was after nine before our baggage arrived. As we stretched upon the slope, the keen air of the summit region swept the valley and chilled us to the skin; the temperature sank to below freezing, and we had nothing but the things in which we stood. [72] Our friends, the Cossack officers, were lavish of assistance; they wrapped us in the hairy coats of the Caucasus, placed vodki and partridges before us, and ranged us around their hospitable circle, beside the leaping flames. But the mind was absent from the picturesque bivouac, and the eye which ranged the deepening shadows was still dazzled by the evening lights. Mind and sense alike were saturated with the beauty and the brilliance of the landscape, which, as you rise towards the edge of the platform after rounding the mass of Takjaltu, opens to an ever-increasing perspective, with ever-growing clearness of essential features and mystery gathering upon all lesser forms. The sun, revolving south of the zenith, lights the mountains on the north of the plain, and fills all the valley from the slopes of Ararat with the full flood of his rays--tier after tier of crinkled hummock ranges, aligned upon the opposite margin of the valley at a distance of over twenty miles, their summit outline fretted with shapes of cones and craters, their faces buttressed in sand, bare and devoid of all vegetation, yet richly clothed in lights and hues of fairyland--ochres flushed with delicate madder, amethyst, shaded opaline, while the sparse plantations about the river and the labyrinth of the plain insensibly transfigure, as you rise above them, into an impalpable web of grey. In the lap of the landscape lies the river, a thin, looping thread--flashes of white among the shadows, in the lights a bright mineral green. Here and there on its banks you descry a naked mound--conjuring a vision of forgotten civilisations and the buried hives of man. It is a vast prospect over the world.... Yet vaster far is the expanse you feel about you beyond the limits of sight. It is nothing but a segment of that expanse, a brief vista from north to east between two mountain sides. On the north the slopes of Great Ararat hide the presence of Alagöz, while behind the needle form of Little Ararat all the barren chains and lonely valleys of Persia are outspread.... The evening grows, and the sun's returning arc bends behind the dome of snow. The light falls between the two mountains, and connects the Little Ararat in a common harmony with the richening tints of the plain. There it stands on the further margin of the platform, the clean, sharp outline of a pyramid, clothed in hues of a tender yellow, seamed with violet veins. At its feet, where its train sweeps the floor of the river valley in long and regular folds--far away in