A full day's journey ahead of us, all along the eastern horizon, lies a huge squat bun-shaped mountain, just over 6000 feet high. This is Karaja Dagh, the great extinct volcano, the outermost of that group of volcanoes which lie to the north of Mesopotamia, in Armenia and eastern Kurdistan. This region must have been the scene, at some remote geological epoch, of some of the greatest eruptions that have ever occurred on this globe. The five huge craters which produced them (not to mention a host of smaller ones)[16] are ranged diagonally athwart the country in a line some 300 miles long. At the north-eastern end is Alageuz, 150 miles south of the Caucasus. Then come Ararat, Sipan, and Nimrud; with Karaja at the south-western end. The biggest of all perhaps was Nimrud, a mountain but little higher than Karaja, but possessing the third largest crater that is known to exist in the world. Karaja would seem to consist of a group of associated craters; something like the Puy de Dome mountains, but infinitely grander in scale. It is held by many commentators that the site of the Garden of Eden was near modern Van and Bitlis, round about the head waters of the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Araxes, and the Zab. If so, then the Garden of Eden now lies buried beneath the lava of these volcanoes; and where could we find fitter antitypes of the Cherubim with the flaming swords? Karaja juts out towards the plains like a huge cape, isolated from the mountains; and our road slowly heaves itself upward to find a way over its tail. As a road it is incredibly villainous, for it takes the basalt boulders _au naturel_, and hardly an attempt has been made anywhereto form a surface at all.[17] Round our left sweep the desolate fields of broken and disintegrating lava. On our right they rise, terrace on terrace, toward the mountain from which they flowed. And as we leave the mountain behind, and continue our way to the eastward, the aspect of the country changes little: it is still lava that surrounds us on every side. At length, two full days beyond Severek, we descry a city ahead of us. A city notable for its size, and yet more for its menacing aspect:--a grim black row of massive towers and curtains, with the slender stems of a dozen minarets shooting up into the sky behind the ramparts like reeds behind a dyke of stone. The snow peaks on our left stretch beyond it, and fade off gradually into the distance; and as we draw nearer we perceive that on our right the town is guarded by the deep ravine of the Tigris. Such is Diarbekr--Black Amida; whose classical name is not yet disused entirely, and which owes its inseparable epithet to the basalt of which it is built.