It is to be expected that the natural features of a land where so primitive a state of things prevails will be rugged; and those of Hakkiari are wild and strange enough to merit a special description. The mountains are in fact a section of that great Taurus range, which extends in a curve from the shores of the Mediterranean to somewhere south of Baghdad. At this point they are pierced by a large river, the Zab, which rises well to the north of them on the Armenian plateau; and with rare determination bores its way clean through the range, till it emerges on the Mesopotamian level to the south of it, and so falls into the Tigris a little below Mosul. The cleft that it makes in the mountains is one of the great _cañons_ of the world, comparable, in the opinion of those who have seen all, to the gorges of Yosemite and the "great Cañon of Colorado." Midway in its course the peaks of Supa Durig and Koka Bulend, the two kings of that wilderness, stand opposite to one another. Each is nearly fourteen thousand feet in height above the sea; and as a bird flies, their crests are not more than twelve miles apart. But the level of the river Zab that flows between them is only 4000 feet above the sea at that point, so that the net depth of the gorge is over 9000 feet. We presume that this insistence on the part of the river arises from the fact that the huge wrinkle of the earth's surface which men call the mountains of Taurus is of later date than the elevation of the plateau to the north of it; and that consequently, as the rivers were already flowing to the south, they steadily gouged away the barrier, as it was being slowly heaved up. Or perhaps the Zab may have found some great crevasse in the mountains which gave it the opportunity that it needed. Whatever the process, the result has been a series of most magnificent gorges, with walls falling almost precipitously from the level of eternal snow to that of fig-tree, vine, and olive; and side ravines which are scarcely inferior to the main gorge in grandeur. So narrow is the chasm, and so steep the sides of it, that even at the river level avalanches form a very real danger to spring travel, and must often be crossed by hundreds in a day's march. Such crossing is not too easy; for smooth snow at an angle of 40°, terminated by a drop into a swollen torrent, may be dangerous for any caravan to traverse; and many are the tales told of the escapes or deaths of mountaineers.