[142] {291}["Tubal-Cain [the seventh in descent from Cain] was an instructor of every artificer of brass and iron" (Gen. iv. 22). According to the Book of Enoch, cap. viii., it was "Azazel," one of the "sons of the heavens," who "taught men to make swords, and knives, and skins, and coats of mail, and made known to them metals, and the art of working them, bracelets and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyebrows, and the most costly and choicest stones, and all colouring tincture, so that the world was changed.">[

[143] [Vide post, [p 294.]]

[144] {294}[Byron's knowledge of Mount Ararat was probably derived from the following passage in Tournefort: "It is a most frightful sight; David might well say such sort of places show the grandeur of the Lord. One can't but tremble to behold it; and to look on the horrible precipices ever so little will make the head turn round. The noise made by a vast number of crows [hence the 'rushing sound,' vide post, [p. 295]], who are continually flying from one side to the other, has something in it very frightful. To form any idea of this place you must imagine one of the highest mountains in the world opening its bosom, only to show the most horrible spectacle that can be thought of. All the precipices are perpendicular, and the extremities are rough and blackish, as if a smoke came out of the sides and smutted them."—A Voyage in the Levant, by M. [Joseph Pitton de] Tournefort, 1741, iii. 205, 206.

Kitto also describes this "vast chasm," which contained "an enormous mass of ice, which seems to have fallen from a cliff that overhangs the ice" (Travels in Persia, 1846, i. 34); but Professor Friedrich Parrot, who was the first to ascend Mount Ararat, does not enlarge upon the "abyss" or chasm.—Journey to Ararat, translated by W. D. Cowley, 1845, p. 134.]

[145] [Compare the description of the "roots like snakes," which "wind out from rock and sand," in the scene on the Hartz Mountains in Goethe's Faust.]

[146] {296} [Medwin (Conversations, 1824, p. 233) compares the laughter of the fiends in the cave of Caucasus with the snoring of the Furies in the Eumenides of Æschylus—

Ῥέγκουσι δ' oὐ πλατοῖσι φυσιάμασιν (line 53).

("Their snoring nostrils blow fearsome breath.")

There is a closer parallel with—

Γελᾶ δὲ δαίμων ἐπ' ἀνδρὶ θερμῶ (line 560).