Relieved of the tension of a fixed purpose, we were able to turn with real enjoyment to the contemplation of the surroundings in which we were placed. There can scarcely exist in the world another such standpoint as the platform of the sirdar's well. You never tire of the contrasting shapes of the massive dome and the graceful pyramid; below you in the plains the silent operations of Nature proceed on their daily course. Morning breaks, and the floor of the plain is shrouded in white mist; the sun rises, and the opposite peaks of the Sevan ranges are crowned with banks of billowing cloud. Stray films wander out into the blue vault of heaven, and graze the sides of the dome. As the day grows, the warm air mounts these sides and melts the snows, which distil into a white vaporous mass. The ground of the landscape increases in definition of feature--the rich campagna, the looping river, the sites of the towns. It is the subtle quality no less than the scale of the composition which distinguishes this prospect from other views, similar in character, which are unfolded from the summit of a pass. And if you turn from the immense expanse and rest the eye on the forms about you, those forms respond to your emotions and invest them with a deeply religious cast. This vast fabric, so harmonious in design, in position so self-sufficient, touches chords in the nature of man which sound through all the religions, and die away only when they die. Yet how vulgar appear their dogmas in this pure atmosphere of religion, in the courts of this great cathedral of the natural world! You feel that this mountain has been the parent of religions, whence they strayed into devious paths. To this parent you would again collect the distracted; in this atmosphere you long to bathe the populations of our great towns. Our morbid dramatists, our nervous novelists need the inspiration of these surroundings--the promptings of Nature in her loftiest manifestations, from which the life of man can never with impunity be divorced.