The savage sea has no pity!
It hears not the plaintive voice of my broken heart;
The blood freezes in my veins,
Black night descends upon my eyes....
Go tell to my mother
To sit and weep for her darkened son;
That John was the prey of the sea,
The sun of the young man is set!
Summer, with its flowers, and warmth, and wealth, never stays long enough in Armenia for it to become a common ordinary thing. It is a beautiful wonder-time, a brief, splendid nature-fair, which vanishes like a dream before the first astonishment and delight are worn into indifference. The season when "the nightingale sings to the rose at dewy dawn" departs swiftly, and envious winter strangles autumn in its birth.
What a winter, too! a winter which despotically governs the complete economy of the people's system of life. Let us take a peep into an Armenian interior on a December evening. Three months the snow has been in possession of mountain and valley; for more than four months more it will remain. Abroad it is light enough, though night has fallen; for the moon shines down in wonderful brightness upon the ice-bound earth. On the hill-slope various little unevennesses are discernible, jutting out from the snow like mushrooms. In one part the ground is cut away perpendicularly for a few feet; this is the front of the homestead, the body of which lies burrowed in the slope of the hill. When the house was made the floor was dug out some five feet underground, while the ceiling beams rose three or four feet above it; but all the dug-out soil was thrown about the roof and back and side walls, and thus the whole is now embedded in the hillock. The roof was neatly turfed over when the house was finished, so that in summer the lambs and children play upon it, and not unfrequently, in the great heats, the family sleep there—"at the moon's inn." What look like mushrooms are in reality the broad-topped chimneys, on which the summer storks build their nests. The homestead has but one entrance; a large front door which leads through a long dark passage to a second door that swings-to after you, and is hung with a rough red-dyed sheepskin. This door opens upon the entrance-hall, whence you mount half-a-dozen steps to a raised platform, under which the house dogs are located. On two sides the platform is bounded by solid stone walls, from which are suspended saddles, guns, pistols, and one or two pictures representing the deeds of some Persian hero, and bought of Persian hawkers. On the other two sides an open woodwork fence divides it from a vast stable. Nearest the grating are fastened the horses of the clan-chief; next are the donkeys, then the cows; sheep and chickens find places where they can. The breath of these animals materially contributes to the warmth of the house, which is at times almost like an oven, even in the coldest weather. A clear hot fire burns on the hearth; the fuel used is tezek, a preparation of cow-dung pressed into a substance resembling peat turf. By day the habitation is obscurely lighted through a small aperture in the roof glazed with oiled silk, and supplemented by a sort of funnel, the wide opening downwards. Now, in the evening, the oil burning in a simple iron lamp over the hearth, affords a dim illumination.