MAP OF TURKEY IN ASIA.
A day’s journey up the eastern branch of the Euphrates brings us to the Castle-rock of Palu. This rock is nine hundred feet above the river and on its summit is the town of about one thousand five hundred houses. Palu has the honor of being the dwelling place of St. Mesrob, the saint who invented the Armenian alphabet about 406 A. D., and translated the Scriptures into that tongue. His name is still in great repute in his native country.
If we should leave the valley of the Euphrates to the northward, five hours of steep climbing would bring us to the top of the mountain ridge that overlooks the great plain of Moush, which stretches forty miles away to the eastward towards Lake Van. From the top of this ridge to the Monastery of St. John the Baptist the road is one of the most beautiful in all Armenia, as it follows a terrace path along the mountain side through low forests, commanding a succession of beautiful views into the valley of the Euphrates. On rounding a shoulder of the mountain we have the first sight of the towers of the monastery, which occupies a small table of ground with very steep slopes both above and below it, at an elevation of six thousand feet above the sea and about two thousand above the plain.
This Monastery was founded by St. Gregory the Illuminator, the Apostle of the Armenians, having in residence before the massacres twenty Monks and one hundred lay brethren under the care of the Superior. Some of these priests were highly educated, speaking French fluently beside Armenian and Turkish. But all these monasteries were utterly destroyed by the Kurds in the late savage raids.
The town of Moush is nearly a day’s ride up the Euphrates valley from the point where the road down the mountains from the Monastery reaches the river. The plain is one of great beauty—quite productive, growing fine harvests of wheat. Fine gardens are found about the villages which nestle in the ravines which put up into the Taurus mountains on the south side of the plain. At the head of one of these narrow valleys is the city of Moush of three thousand houses, about one-fourth of them belonging to Armenians. The hillsides are devoted to gardens and vineyards which flourish here, though the elevation is four thousand feet above the sea. This plain was swept with the wind of desolation at the time of the Sassoun massacre.
As we continue our journey up the valley we rapidly rise above the plain into the mountains which separate the valley of Moush from Lake Van.
A few hours’ ride from Nurshin, the last Armenian village, takes us through a mountain pass about six thousand feet high, into the territory of the Kurds—Kurdestan.
We take this way that we may more readily understand how the Kurds and the Turks could make such awful havoc of the Armenians when they were “let loose” upon them.
When the head of this pass is reached, we are at a point of some geographical interest. It is one of Nature’s great crossroads. The waters from this mountain plateau, flow north and westward down the valley of Moush into the Euphrates, another valley opens eastward and downwards into Lake Van, and another southwards into the Tigris. It is somewhat similar to the water shed in the Rocky Mountains above Leadville, Col., where, from the same marshy plateau, the waters flow southward, forming the Arkansas, and so through the Royal Gorge, into the plains of Colorado eastward, and also westward and southward into the Grand River, through a most magnificent and beautiful Canon, past Glenwood Springs and so into the Colorado River and the Gulf of California.
Let us turn southward and make an excursion to Bitlis before resuming the journey to Van. At various points in this high mountain valley are massively built stone Khans which are intended as refuges for travelers at unfavorable seasons of the year. They make considerable pretensions to architectural beauty, having portals and arched recesses and are of great antiquity. Three hours’ hard riding down a bare stony valley would bring us to the entrance of Bitlis.