[4] According to the official statistics the population amounts to 3435 souls, of whom the Armenians number 1709 and the Turks 1578. [↑]
CHAPTER XXI
GEOGRAPHICAL
In the present chapter I shall invite my reader to make good his advantage over the traveller, and to realise, before proceeding further with the journey, the true meaning and wider connection of those natural features which have composed the landscape day by day. At the same time I shall endeavour to trace the limits of north-eastern or Russian Armenia, extending our view for awhile to comprise the whole of Armenia, and again narrowing it to the area of the Russian provinces.
But at the outset we are prompted to examine the conception so vaguely expressed by the metaphors of tableland and frame of mountain ranges which, with slight variations in the figure, have in the foregoing pages so often been employed. The pursuit of this analysis carries us beyond the sphere of our particular survey, compelling us to consider the structure of Asia as a whole.
From the Mediterranean to the Pacific the Asiatic continent is traversed by a zone of elevated country, which, flanked on the north and south by great chains of mountains, breaks off on the west to the Ægean Sea and to the lowlands of China on the east. Extensive areas of land with considerably lesser altitude are outspread on either side of this gigantic system: in the north the plains of Russia and Siberia, in the south the peninsulas of Arabia and India. The mountain chains which confine the zone of elevated country have been reared during different geological periods; yet they are subject to common laws. They are disposed in extensive arcs, of greater or lesser curvature, which are festooned across the continent on either side of the plateau region with a general direction from east to west. The plateau region is in general synclinal or, in other words, of slightly hollow surface, and, in comparison with the flanking ranges, is flat.
THE STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF ASIA
Engraved and printed by Wagner & Debes, Leipzig.