At Akhalkalaki we had reached a country which is peopled in large preponderance by the Armenian race. The town is the centre of an administrative division (ouezde), which is dependent upon the Government of Tiflis. This division is partitioned into two administrative districts, of which the most northerly takes its name from the village of Baralet, on the way to Lake Tabizkhuro; while the more southerly is called the district of Bogdanovka, a Russian settlement on the road to Alexandropol. The population of the division amounts to a total, according to the published statistics, of 59,500 souls; or, according to the figures which were kindly communicated to me by the Governor, of 66,000 souls. The numbers of the Armenians are given in the first of these lists as over 42,000, a proportion of seven-tenths of the whole; while in the Governor's list, which, I presume, is the most recent, they are censused at 58,000, a proportion of seven-eighths. I am inclined to place more reliance on the total furnished by the Governor than upon his subdivision according to race; and I shall conclude that the Georgians contribute a sixth of the inhabitants and the Russian settlers something less than a tenth. These figures do not comprise the town of Akhalkalaki, which, out of a total population of something over 4000, contains 4000 Armenian inhabitants. [41] Be they immigrants or aboriginal, the character of their surroundings is in harmony with the instincts of their race. A vast and elevated plain upon which the snow lies in winter and a southern sun shines. A fertile volcanic soil, abounding in springs and favourable to cereals of every kind. Measured from north-east to south-west, the plain of Akhalkalaki has a length of nearly forty miles; [42] its latitudinal extension may be gauged by the course of the Kur on the west, and, on the east, by that of the stream which issues from Lake Madatapa and skirts the outworks of the eastern meridional range. The plain is situated at an altitude which ranges between 5500 and 7000 feet. The soil, when exposed by the plough, is black in colour, or, perhaps, dark chocolate, and reveals the influence of the lavas below. The extreme evenness of the surface is due to the fluid nature of these lavas, which streamed, at a comparatively recent period, from fissures at the southern base of the Trialethian Mountains and from vents at other points of the mountain girdle which encircles the flat expanse. On the floor of the plain itself the effects of volcanic action are visible in the forms of hummock and rounded hill. Volcanic emissions have produced the lap-like enclosures which are the reservoirs of the lonely lakes. Their waters are fed by springs from beneath the surface, and by copious rains from the clouds of the Pontic region, which fly the topmost bulwarks of the tableland and distil on the western slopes of the meridional volcanic barrier, the limit on the east of the even ground.