"The afternoon was devoted to the great natural wonders of Baku, petroleum and the everlasting fires. At Surakhani the whole country is saturated with petroleum; on making a hole in the ground the gas escapes, on lighting which it burns for a very long while, one of the few spots on earth where this phenomenon can be seen. When there is no wind the flame is dull and small, but in a gale it roars and leaps up eight or ten feet. There are two naphtha refining establishments at Surakhani, the furnaces of which are entirely heated by the natural gas, which is collected as it rises out of the ground in an iron tank and led off by pipes. At night the whole place is lighted in the same manner, by ordinary gas burners attached to the walls. On returning home in the evening we saw the silent waste, lit up by various fires, each surrounded by a group of wild Tartars cooking their food by its heat. "We shall have occasion further on to furnish more particular information respecting the enormous yield of the wells around Baku, and therefore in this connection only incidentally allude to the statement of the geographer, who notices the 'seven hundred oil wells' which have all been drilled, none of which shows any signs of exhaustion, and says that 'immense loss is caused by the ignorance of those engaged in the trade. Thus a well at Balakhani, yielding 36,571 barrels of naphtha daily, ran waste for four weeks before reservoirs could be prepared to receive the oil.'" A celebrated Russian scientist, after a visit to Baku in 1882, said: "Comparing results achieved in the two countries on one side and the average depth and total number of wells on the other, it may justly be stated that the natural petroleum wells of Baku, as far as our knowledge goes, have no parallel in the world."