At a quarter to six—we had left Efremovka at 4.20—we were winding between the two Shishtapas, on our right the Turkish Shishtapa, washed by the young stream of the Arpa; the Armenian Shishtapa further away on our left. At six o’clock we crossed a bridge which spans a tributary of the Arpa, coming from the east. The confluence takes place some hundred yards below the bridge, and the name of the tributary was given to us as Kizil-Goch (the red lamb). It is a solid stone bridge with a curious stone ornament; on the further side you rise to an eminence which overlooks the Arpa, and upon which the lonely post station of Shishtapa is built.
The doors were heavily barred; when at length they yielded, after many grumblings, a wizened figure in official uniform stepped forth. It was the postmaster—it seemed the embodiment of some immense and ideal sorrow of which all human griefs are but the mirrored images. How cross the threshold upon which he stood, how enlist his sympathy with our puny wants, who himself was the incarnation of Want? But the keenness of the air overcame our hesitation; a night in tents and without blankets was the alternative course. So with a greeting, which was coldly returned, we led the way to the interior, followed by our dismal host. It appeared to consist of a single room, a spacious apartment with bare floor and white-washed walls. A few chairs and a large table were the only furniture; the only ornaments the usual coloured oleograph of the reigning emperor, and, perhaps, the almanac and the posting map, which were suspended on the walls. Yet the postmaster was not the only occupant of the building; children appeared, and with them a young and beautiful girl. A Polish maiden? one could not doubt of the answer, as one admired the slender form, the swelling bust, the full lips and the pale face with its animated eyes. Ah! the pitiful story eloquently told by this unambiguous presence—the mother already a victim to the prolonged atrophy of these cheerless surroundings, the father a sapless tree in an alien soil. Who sent them to such cold solitudes, these warm natures and passionate temperaments? Find a wilderness and it will be tenanted by a Pole.... The practical question arose: how accommodate ourselves and the family within the four white walls? The father protested that it was completely impossible; the girl came to our assistance, and revealed the existence of an adjoining closet, which she offered to share with the children for the night. After partaking of a frugal meal, after several futile attempts at sustained conversation, our strange party disposed itself for the night.
For myself, I could not sleep, for all the comfort of my camp bed, and memories of sound slumbers which it evoked. Was it the grave faces of the Russian peasants and the strange irony of their history and circumstances that haunted and kept the mind strung? Or were the senses fluttering under the presence of the fair woman whose soft breathing one could almost hear? God residing in those frames of steel, God incarnate in her voluptuousness!—Yet their God was not the God of the pantheist, but a stern, a militant God.... And thought wandered out into the stony by-paths, the home of the sprites that mock thought. The ingenious wickedness of man with his Churches and his heretics, and all the cowering crowd of Jews, Armenians, Poles!
A faint light was already diffused over the cheerless apartment as I passed down the row of heavy sleepers and gained the door and the open air. Day had broken—a morning of perfect stillness, the vapours lingering on the saturated grass. A cold, grey world of bleak uplands and mist-veiled mountains, a chill atmosphere which sent one pacing to and fro. But when the sun rose above the haze into the clear vault of heaven, the colours started, the chill softened into delicious freshness, and the peculiar beauty of the scene was revealed. One looked in vain for the snowy fangs of Alagöz; they had been lost to view behind the amphitheatre of nearer outlines which composed the closing phases of our stage of yesterday. But within the limits of those gentler shapes was outspread an ideal landscape, typical of the most elevated areas of the tableland (Fig. [22]). The plainer levels were invested with the character of swelling downs, and down and hillside were carpeted with turf. Over the green and fibrous surface flowed the Arpa and its tributary, flashes of white and luminous blue. Here and there brief patches of cultivation checkered the soil, especially towards north-west and west. In the middle distance one could discern two villages of moderate size—the two Shishtapas, barely distinguished from the waste. Beyond the Turkish Shishtapa, obscuring all but the first line of the settlement, lay a captive cloud, an opaque opaline mass. The illustration shows the rivers descending towards you and uniting at your feet. The hills which line the distance circle round and mass behind you, closing the prospect towards the south. In that direction the united waters bid farewell to the grassy uplands, and enter the stony tracts which slope to the plain of Alexandropol between the outworks of the Chaldir system and those of the meridional border range.
Fig. 22. Head Waters of the Arpa Chai.
September 7.—By half-past eight we were following the course of the Arpa and taking leave of the green meadows and blue streams. We were soon involved among the hummock ridges which confine the amphitheatre of the Shishtapas, and through which the river winds in a stony valley, at some little distance to the west of the track. Progress was retarded by the steepness of the inclines as we crossed this elevated ground. Once again in possession of a prospect, we were skirting the bases of successive promontories, which projected, on our left hand, from the mountains of the meridional border into the broken surface of a volcanic plateau. This plateau extends for many miles to the westward, and is bounded by lofty mountains on that side. The Arpa was running off into the easier levels in the west, while the road hugged the rocky eastern shore. The waters of the river were not visible after leaving Shishtapa; they are buried in a cañon, of which you trace the sinuous edges through the bleak and boulder-strewn waste. Ala-Kilisa, a village of Armenian-speaking Greeks; Amasia, a Turkish settlement; Karachanta and Kara Mehemet, the first inhabited by Turks, the second by Armenians, were successively left behind. At half-past ten we arrived at the station of Jellap, a stage of twenty versts (thirteen miles).
The post house is situated at some little distance from the village—an Armenian settlement which is exposed to view after you have left the station, high-seated among the rocks above the road. It is a gloomy habitation, standing in a stony valley by the banks of a stream which descends to the trough of the Arpa from the rocky hummocks to which the road adheres. Starting at a few minutes after eleven, we commenced by crossing a projecting promontory, mounting the slopes of the puny ridges by steep gradients, and never regaining the prospect which had been lost before reaching Jellap. At length, at half-past eleven, the valleys opened; and we overlooked the landscape of the plain of Alexandropol.
Fig. 23. Alagöz from the Plain of Alexandropol.