At midnight we set sail. When I awoke at half-past seven, the sky was blue in the zenith above my eyes. Set within that field of brightness, the pale crescent of the moon marked the boundary of a sheet of cirrus cloud. The gauzy tissues deepened as they neared the horizon, and gathered into long banks of heavy vapour, suspended about the summits of the chain of inky mountains which borders the lake upon the south. In that distant and gloomy range I at once recognised the features of the mountains of Kurdistan. It was the same chain that I had followed for weeks upon the waters of the Tigris, threading the vast plains between Diarbekr and the Persian Gulf. Day by day those steep parapets, sharp peaks, and gleaming snows had accompanied the peaceful voyage of my little raft. How well I now recalled the longing I had then experienced to explore the famous lake on their further side! What a thrill of pleasure I now felt to be floating upon its waters, expanding towards those mountains with the proportions of a sea! The reflection of the blue vault above us paled and whitened as the flood approached that long black line. Bank upon bank, the clouds were serried upon the peaks, shot by the lights from the snows. Here and there the fretted outline of a pearly bed of vapour was drawn across the background of dull opal in the region of the middle slopes; or wreathing forms, like smoke, clinging to the sides of some loftier eminence, broke the horizontal layers. The scene behind us contrasted the softness of a southern landscape with the stern grandeur of the coast above our prow. The northern shores of the lake were bathed in light; and the hummock convexities of the Ala Dagh, streaked with snow towards the summits, rose against a sky of transparent turquoise, and sank to a surface of more solid substance, but not less pure and not less blue. From these heights, across the long sheet of azure water to dazzling snow in the heaven above our heads, the fabric of Sipan mounted slowly to the flat rim of the central crater, and, sweeping past us, declined, with equal majesty of outline, to low ground in the west. The great volcano composes one whole side of the lake, and faces full south. I observed that the snow-line was perceptibly higher than on the occasion when we had approached the mountain from the north. The western limits of the lake were vague, and, in places, invisible; the mass of Nimrud, dim and cloud-streaked, had the appearance of a long island, rising on the horizon between the sunny slopes of Sipan and the nebulous barrier of the Kurdish chain.