The moderate elevation of these highlands above the plain of the Araxes and their long extension from east to west are conditions favourable to the full appreciation of the landscape, and of each new feature in the slowly-changing scene. Their free position contributes to invest them with the character of a natural gallery, which commands unbroken prospects over some of the grandest works of Nature in her most inspired moods. The European, whose conception of mountain scenery is founded upon the arbitrary peaks and scattered valleys characteristic of his Alps, who has looked with emotion upon the doubtful features of his lowlands from the summit of some famous pass, can scarcely fail to be deeply impressed by the attributes of a panorama in which reliefs and depressions of stupendous scale are disposed as members of a great design, and are seen in the pure atmosphere of an Eastern climate with all the clearness of a model in clay. At his feet lies a plain which is level as water, which in no very remote geological period was covered by an inland sea. It is a distance of some thirty miles to its opposite confines; yet the towns and the plantations are pencilled upon its surface as though they had been traced by a draughtsman's pen. The plain is bordered by the volcanic range which we have come to know as the Ararat system--a chain of which the jagged and fantastic outline is already familiar from many a rich sunset effect. The summits rise to nearly 8000 feet above the campagna; but how humble they appear behind the train of the fabric of Ararat, gathering immediately from the floor of the plain! The bold snow bastions of the north-western slope are seen in face from these highlands; and it is difficult to realise that the pronounced lineaments which compose that airy figure are removed by a space of nearly forty miles. We had not yet lost sight of the line of poplars which screens the cloister when the distinctive features of this magnificent landscape were unfolded to our view. The several ranges and mountain masses were disposed in the form of an amphitheatre, of which we seemed to occupy one of the middle tiers. In the east, along the Araxes, the crinkled buttresses of the northern border were still visible, projecting in a southerly direction beyond the cock-combed hill of Karniarch. In the west, at an interval of sixty miles from those eminences, the level ground extended to a double-peaked mountain which juts out into the valley from the Ararat system, and is known under the name of Takjaltu. Face to face with one another stood Alagöz and Ararat. In the plain we could discern an isolated hummock, north of the Araxes and bearing about south-west. It marks the site of Armavir.