eastern and western
extremities, into rather prominent abutments, and separated by a snow
valley, or depression, from 50 to 100 feet in depth. The eastern top, on
which we were standing, was quite extensive, and 30 to 40 feet lower than
its western neighbor. Both tops are hummocks on the huge dome of Ararat,
like the humps on the back of a camel, on neither one of which is there a
vestige of anything but snow.

[Illustration: ON THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT ARARAT--FIRING THE FOURTH OF JULY
SALUTE.]

There remained just as little trace of the crosses left by Parrot and
Chodzko, as of the ark itself. We remembered the pictures we had seen in
our nursery-books, which represented this mountain-top covered with green
grass, and Noah stepping out of the ark, in the bright, warm sunshine,
before the receding waves; and now we looked around and saw this very spot
covered with perpetual snow. Nor did we see any evidence whatever of a
former existing crater, except perhaps the snow-filled depression we have
just mentioned. There was nothing about this perpetual snow-field, and the
freezing atmosphere that was chilling us to the bone, to remind us that we
were on the top of an extinct volcano that once trembled with the
convulsions of subterranean heat.

The view from this towering height was immeasurably extensive, and almost
too grand. All detail was lost--all color, all outline; even the
surrounding mountains seemed to be but excrescent ridges of the plain.
Then, too, we could catch only occasional glimpses, as the clouds shifted
to and fro. At one time they opened up beneath us, and revealed the Aras
valley with its glittering ribbon of silver at an abysmal depth below. Now
and then we could descry the black volcanic peaks of Ali Ghez forty miles
away to the northwest, and on the southwest the low mountains that
obscured the town of Bayazid. Of the Caucasus, the mountains about Erzerum
on the west, and Lake Van on the south, and even of the Caspian Sea, all
of which are said to be in Ararat's horizon, we could see absolutely
nothing.

Had it been a clear day we could have seen not only the rival peaks of the
Caucasus, which for so many years formed the northern wall of the
civilized world, but, far to the south, we might have descried the
mountains of Quardu land, where Chaldean legend has placed the landing of
the ark. We might have gazed, in philosophic mood, over the whole of the
Aras valley, which for 3000 years or more ha