out with profound attention, then looked at
one another in silence, and gravely shook their heads. They could not
believe it. It was impossible. Old Ararat stood above us grim and terrible
beneath the twinkling stars. To them it was, as it always will be, the
same mysterious, untrodden height--the palace of the jinn.

III

THROUGH PERSIA TO SAMARKAND

"It is all bosh," was the all but universal opinion of Bayazid in regard
to our alleged ascent of Ararat. None but the Persian consul and the
mutessarif himself deigned to profess a belief in it, and the gift of
several letters to Persian officials, and a sumptuous dinner on the eve of
our departure, went far toward proving their sincerity.

On the morning of July 8, in company with a body-guard of zaptiehs, which
the mutessarif forced upon us, we wheeled down from the ruined
embattlements of Bayazid. The assembled rabble raised a lusty cheer at
parting. An hour later we had surmounted the Kazlee Gool, and the "land of
Iran" was before us. At our feet lay the Turco-Persian battle-plains of
Chaldiran, spreading like a desert expanse to the parched barren hills
beyond, and dotted here and there with clumps of trees in the village
oases. And this, then, was the land where, as the poets say, "the
nightingale sings, and the rose-tree blossoms," and where "a flower is
crushed at every step!" More truth, we thought, in the Scotch traveler's
description, which divides Persia into two portions--"One desert with salt,
and the other desert without salt." In time we came to McGregor's opinion
as expressed in his description of Khorassan. "We should fancy," said he,
"a small green circle round every village indicated on the map, and shade
all the rest in brown." The mighty hosts whose onward sweep from the Indus
westward was checked only by the Grecian phalanx upon the field of
Marathon must have come from the scattered ruins around, which reminded us
that "Iran was; she is no more." Those myriad ranks of Yenghiz Khan and
Tamerlane brought death and desolation from Turan to Iran, which so often
met to act and react upon one another that both are now only landmarks in
the sea of oblivion.

[Illustration: HARVEST SCENE NEAR KHOI.]

Our honorary escort accompanied us several miles over the border to the
Persian village of Killissakend, and there committed us to the hospitality
of the district khan, with whom we m