The delimitation work in itself was uninteresting, being carried on in barren and solitary regions where there was nothing but rock, without either grass or inhabitants. Gordon said he would not take thirty square miles for a gift, and yet the Turks and Russians clung to it, bringing witnesses from among the tribes who would swear whatever they were paid for. The question at issue was where the old frontier between the Persian province of Erivan and the Pashalik of Baizeth was fixed. The Persians ceded the province of Erivan to Russia in 1828, and both the Turks and Russians had their own, and necessarily conflicting, views as to where the frontier was. General Gordon's own belief that there had never been any real frontier at all was no doubt the right one. The English officers, without any assistance from their Turkish colleagues, who merely looked on when they were not keeping up the supply of witnesses, had to effect the best arrangement they could with the Russians. In the course of his survey of the frontier, which he said he examined almost foot by foot, Gordon came to Mount Ararat, which he very nearly ascended, as he tells the reader in the following graphic narrative:-- "When we arrived at the foot of Mount Ararat we were unable to proceed along the frontier any further because the ground becomes extremely broken by the innumerable streams of lava which have run down from it. The ground is black with cinders. They look as if quite recently emitted, and no one would imagine from their appearance that Ararat had been extinct so long. Our road went along the northern or Russian slope of Ararat, and passed through a very old city called Kourgai, where there are still the remains of a church and part of an old castle. Even the Armenians do not pretend to know its history, but some of them say that Noah lived there. It is situated half-way up the mountain, and there is no living person within twelve miles of it. There used to be a populous village named Aralik, with 5000 inhabitants, a little above it, but in 1840 an earthquake shook Mount Ararat, and in four minutes an immense avalanche had buried this place so completely as to leave scarcely any vestige of its site. Not a single person escaped, which is not to be wondered at, considering the mass that fell. Stones of twenty or thirty tons were carried as far as fifteen to twenty miles into the plain. It has left a tremendous cleft in Ararat itself. Other villages were destroyed at the same time, but none so completely as this. The village immediately below Aralik was also destroyed, but the graveyard remained untouched, and the tombstones stand up intact in the midst of the ruins. The common people say that it was saved on account of a saint who was buried there. All these places have a very lonely look. Both the Kurds and the Armenians,