At this season of the year the traveller is warned to beware of the blizzards which render formidable the crossing of the Kop Pass. The name of that pass is pronounced with a certain degree of terror in the bazars and coffee-houses of Erzerum. Each winter brings its catalogue of disasters to man and beast, buried in the driving snow on those bleak heights. Nor is it easy to perform the passage in a single day from Erzerum, waiting in the city for a favourable occasion. The Kop is situated about forty miles west of the provincial capital; and the barrier upon which it is placed--the wall on the north of Erzerum--can scarcely be surmounted at a more adjacent point while it is covered by the snows. For it is only the continual plying of caravans across a pass which, in this latitude and at so great an elevation above the sea, renders it practicable all the year round. Caravans have chosen the Kop, and there is nothing left to the traveller but to acquiesce in their choice. It was therefore decided to make our first day's stage at the village of Ashkala, on the banks of the Euphrates, a stage of over thirty miles, and thence, on the following day, should the weather be favourable, to take the ascent of the range. We set out at eleven o'clock on the morning of the 6th of February--a dim winter's day, when the sun was struggling with the grey mists spread over the face of land and sky. The thermometer registered no less than 20° of frost (Fahrenheit); plain and mountain were completely covered with deep snow. Even the road scarcely revealed a patch of brown soil, and was distinguishable only by the parallel dints of the ditches in the foreground of the white expanse. But the city was conspicuous on the lowest slope of the southern barrier, where the vaulted summits and bold convexities of that lofty wall of mountain sweep into the lake-like plain. There it lay, a sombre mass, from which projected into the murky atmosphere the outline of a tower, the needle forms of minarets. On its either flank, in a wide half-circle, the chain of heights advanced into the open, more elevated and less contracted towards the north-east, declining but more adjacent on the west. In both directions, the opposite horns of this bay of snow-clad eminences appeared to touch the answering parapet in the north--west and east in a long, straight line, fretted by the shapes of cones and humps, stretched the barrier of that still distant range. The point of apparent intersection between the two outlines are, in fact, the open doors of the plain. In the north-east it is the inlet which leads towards Olti, known as the Gurgi Boghaz: in the west the valley which receives the Kara Su.