Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Across the Arax plain and in Erivan
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ACROSS THE ARAK PLAIN AND IN ERIVAN 141
The soil looks sadly dry and sterile, but in reality it is rich
from håving lam fallow throughout the ages ; once it is given
water and seed, the most splendid crops will spring up every
where. Danaé’s lap awaits the golden ram.
By and by wc came once more to cultivated fields, and
instead of the scorching sun of the parched desert wc ran
into the refreshing shade of the tall plane, mulberry, and
walnut trees around a little town. This was Molla-Bayazet,
with leafy orchards, green fields, irrigation channels, and rows of
slender poplars. Sunburnt boys were bathing in the canal,
and black buffaloes lay motionless in it with their heads above
the water.
Wc stopped, and the inhabitants, mostly men, emerged from
their huts built of sun-baked clay, and with Oriental hospitality
offered us water and sour milk to slake our insatiable thirst.
They also offered us fmit—refreshing juicy apricots and
mulberries. Their faces were of the same mixed types wc
had noticed before, though rather more Armenian, perhaps ;
their clothing was equally grey and Europeanized, with no
cheerful colours, though some of the women were better
dressed and looked neat and clean. They were friendly
folk, but grave and unsmiling. Wc inquired how many
people there were in the town. Only one and a half thousand
now, they replied, but there had once been three and a half
—two thousand håving been massacred or carried off by the
Turks in the last war. They said it as if they had been talking
of the previous year’s harvest ; it was all in the day’s work.
That their animals, great and small, had been tåken, that the
major part of the town lay in ruins, they did not even mention.
Such is the history of the Armenian people. Has any race
on earth passed through such an unbroken succession of
inhuman sufferings ? And has any race displayed more
tenacious vitality throughout the cruel vicissitudes of the
ages ?
Under a roof in the little yard of the hut by which wc
stopped hung a big, queer-looking vessel of brown earthen
ware. It was oblong, round in transverse section, widest in
the middle, and narrowing at each end. The only opening
was in the middle at the top. It proved to be a churn, and
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