Evening had approached as we left the village, and proceeded through the gardens, and crossed to the barren zone beyond. From the rising ground we looked back over the forest of poplars to the sun setting behind the peaks of the Ararat chain. The satellite range wore the same tints of deep, opaque opaline which fretted the horizon during our outward journey. It was shadowed upon the same ground of orange and amber; and the opal hues of the land forms extended round the circle and included the huge, horizontal outline of Alagöz. But the Sevan mountains, in the opposite segment, were touched with pink and luminous yellows; the higher summits were white with fresh snow. In the south-east the landscape was dim and vaporous; nor could the eye distinguish among the gathering shadows the basal slopes of Ararat. The snow-fields of the dome shone with a cold light in the sky, above vague banks of cloud. It was after eight o'clock when we reached the pleasant town garden, and discussed our adventures with the Nachalnik over a cigar. CHAPTER XV AT ERIVAN Oriental cities--and Erivan is still essentially Oriental--may perhaps be said to be built upon two planes. There is the plane of the street, and there is the plane of the flat roofs, all at about the same level. Where the climate during summer renders the rooms of the house untenantable after the walls have been heated through by the sun, the daily life of the inhabitants undergoes a corresponding division into the life of the street and the life of the roof. About an hour before sunset the entire population mounts from the lower apartments, or even from the cellars, to the open platforms, floored with mud and sometimes protected by a low balustrade, which receive the freshness of the evening breeze. It is there that the last and first meals of the day are served, and the quilts spread upon which sleep is enjoyed beneath the stars. A strange scene it is when the faint light of morning has broken, and when the recumbent forms commence to stir. The divisions made by the narrow streets are scarcely perceptible; your own roof appears to join the roofs of your neighbours, and these to compose a single and elevated stage above the landscape of dim earth and flashing stream. Figures, erect from the waist, are revealed in every posture; and it may happen that the cotton drapery has dropped from a woman's shoulders as she stretches her arms in the fancied seclusion of some partial screen. Such scenes are the daily accompaniment of a summer sojourn in the towns upon the lowlands through which the Euphrates and the Tigris flow. In Armenia, with a mean level of several thousand feet above the sea, the practice of sleeping in the open is confined to the depression of this plain of the Araxes; and even here it is only partially indulged. The better-to-do among the inhabitants take refuge in the adjacent mountains when their dwellings have become little better than furnaces. The traveller is