Evening was drawing in when we again reached the entrance to the chasm. We skirt the Kurdish village, we pass a pool of water and a group of barefooted Kurdish girls. Away on our left are the mud houses of the Tartar settlement, and the green clump of trees. To these succeed the bouquets of pink and white atraphaxis, and the scattered crags of conglomerate rock. A flora of great variety starts from the sand and among the stone. While we are crossing this upper region of the base, the sun disappears behind the still, grey clouds; the blue zenith pales and fades. A full moon rises from the grey clouds, wreathing the landscape with soft lights. Heavy quiet reigns over the vast and lonely scene, and the only sound is the cicada's hum. The low, dark outline of the trees of Aralykh is a mere shadow on the plain. Nature touches the chords of that stately and solemn movement which issues in and faintly accompanies the life of man. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE The identification of Mount Ararat with the mountain upon which the Ark rested is at least as early as the adoption of Christianity by the Armenians, and may have been originally made by Jewish prisoners of war. But there does not appear to have existed in the neighbourhood of Ararat an independent local tradition of the Flood; and the mountain is still locally known not as Ararat, but as Masis to the Armenians, and as Aghri Dagh to the Tartars. It is, however, called Ararat in Armenian literature as early as Faustus of Byzantium, who uses the name in relating the story of St. Jacob of Nisibis (Faustus, iii. 10. The name appears to have been wrongly spelt Sararat by the copyists). The Ararat of Scripture is the Assyrian Urardhu; and the "mountains of Ararat" of Genesis viii. 4 must be sought within the country of Urardhu. Dr. Belck has quite recently examined, in the light of his remarkable researches into the lore of the Vannic texts, the question of the original geographical application of the term Urardhu (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Berlin, 1899, pp. 113 seq.); it appears to have spread from a district in Kurdistan, south-west of Lake Urmi, to the country about Lake Van. It would, therefore, seem that the tendency of the term has been to travel north; for the Urardhu or Ararat of the historical period is the province about Mount Ararat, one of the great divisions in the kingdom of the Arsakid monarchs of Armenia, and well known under the name of Ararat to Agathangelus and the earliest Armenian writers. Mount Ararat could scarcely have been known to the peoples of the lowlands, among whom the Biblical legend of the Flood originated. Various aspects of the subject are well discussed by Suess (Das Antlitz der Erde, Leipzic, 1885, vol. i. pp. 25-92; Die Sintfluth), Bryce (Transcaucasia and Ararat, edition of 1896, pp. 211 seq.), and Sayce (Dictionary of the Bible, London, 1898, sub voce Ararat).