Two four-horsed posting carriages had been prepared for the drive to Akhaltsykh, distant 16 1/2 miles. By four o'clock we had rejoined the rest of our party and were leaving behind us the pleasant station of Abastuman. We followed the tripping stream down the narrow valley, the rocky and beetling sides studded with firs from foot to summit; and from among them a ruined castle, ascribed as usual to Queen Thamar, frowned out upon the passage which it controls. But we had not gone far before a complete change came over the landscape; the valley opened, distant prospects were disclosed. Before us lay the scenery which is typical of Armenia and upon which our eyes had rested from the summit of the Zikar Pass. Nature is seldom abrupt in her processes; a transitional character invests the first slopes of the southern watershed; the narrow belt of pine-clad ridges interrupts the contrast between the luscious forests which cover the range on the side of the Black Sea littoral and the barren highlands through which the upper waters of the Kur descend. We had issued from those recesses, and around us in a wide circle were unfolded the Armenian plains. The view ranged over an open country, for the most part bare of vegetation, and featured by a succession of convexities in the friable surface, from the foreground of hummock and hill to the sweeping outlines of the higher masses, changing colour and complexion with every change in the sky. The ground was crumbling with excessive dryness; the soil is rich, and would no doubt yield crops of great value were it cultivated on a liberal scale. Yet all the cultivation we could see was of the nature of little patches of yellow stubble or lightly ploughed land. It was evident that the primitive methods of the East had not been superseded, and that agriculture still partook of the precarious character which is the outcome of centuries of political disturbance--the peasant uncertain of reaping what he has sown. Stony tracts interrupted these plots of reclamation, but in general the surface was apt for the plough. The springs of life had been exhausted by the drought of an Eastern summer; the fertile earth was bare as water, and transparent tints of pink and ochre invested the landscape far and wide. A spirit of vastness and loneliness breathed over the scene; the air was clear and crisp and recalled the bracing climate of the Persian tablelands.