Somewhat to the west of the Urmi-Van road, and up among the highest of the mountains, stands one interesting memorial of the past. One particular valley runs down from the edge of lake Van to the Tigris; a pass open practically all the year round, between the plain of Mesopotamia and the Armenian plateau. It should be a highroad for commerce; but the Kurds who live in it are too turbulent to allow any traveller to pass that way as a rule, and it is very little known in consequence. It was a passage of strategic importance, however, in the days when Rome held Nisibis as her frontier post on the Persian border; and when Armenia was a buffer state of most uncertain loyalty, between the Roman and Sassanid Persian empires. Hence it was a road to guard; and Roman engineers planted upon it one of the grandest of Roman fortresses, which stands to this day practically unruined. Diocletian, who fortified this strategic frontier, was probably its builder; and it must have been evacuated when Jovian ceded the provinces to Persia some fifty years after his day. Since then it has remained derelict, for anyone to occupy who cared; and so it stands still--one of the grandest Roman relics anywhere. It is a great square fortress, built after the pattern of their camps, with the prætorium as its citadel in the centre of the western side. One wall, the northern, has been pulled down to provide material for the mediæval Kurdish _kala_ into which the general's quarters have been transformed; but this probably embodies much of the old citadel in itself. The whole would well repay examination by an expert--provided that its present owner could be got to understand the difference between antiquarianism and espionage, which is doubtful in the extreme. A miserable Kurdish village occupies the interior of this grand fort; the hovels being built, of course, from the hewn stones of the walls. But even these "beggars hutting in the palace" are dimly aware that such a place has harboured greater men than they; and tell you that it was the work of giants and enchanters--at which one does not wonder.