CHAPTER XV
AT ERIVAN
Oriental cities—and Erivan is still essentially Oriental—may perhaps be said to be built upon two planes. There is the plane of the street, and there is the plane of the flat roofs, all at about the same level. Where the climate during summer renders the rooms of the house untenantable after the walls have been heated through by the sun, the daily life of the inhabitants undergoes a corresponding division into the life of the street and the life of the roof. About an hour before sunset the entire population mounts from the lower apartments, or even from the cellars, to the open platforms, floored with mud and sometimes protected by a low balustrade, which receive the freshness of the evening breeze. It is there that the last and first meals of the day are served, and the quilts spread upon which sleep is enjoyed beneath the stars. A strange scene it is when the faint light of morning has broken, and when the recumbent forms commence to stir. The divisions made by the narrow streets are scarcely perceptible; your own roof appears to join the roofs of your neighbours, and these to compose a single and elevated stage above the landscape of dim earth and flashing stream. Figures, erect from the waist, are revealed in every posture; and it may happen that the cotton drapery has dropped from a woman’s shoulders as she stretches her arms in the fancied seclusion of some partial screen. Such scenes are the daily accompaniment of a summer sojourn in the towns upon the lowlands through which the Euphrates and the Tigris flow. In Armenia, with a mean level of several thousand feet above the sea, the practice of sleeping in the open is confined to the depression of this plain of the Araxes; and even here it is only partially indulged. The better-to-do among the inhabitants take refuge in the adjacent mountains when their dwellings have become little better than furnaces. The traveller is advised to swelter within four walls rather than tempt fever from the expanse of irrigated land by exposing himself to the night air.
Fig. 40. Ararat from a house-top in Erivan.
Yet the twofold division of the city into an upper and a lower region is nowhere more productive of startling contrast than in this town of gardens which is Erivan. In the streets, lined as they are with the rude stone walls of the enclosures, surmounted by a crumbling ridge of clay, the vistas are confined by inexorable foliage to the space of a stone’s throw. The central park, with its wide spaces, enjoys no further landscape than that which is limited by the zones of the adjacent buildings or by its own lofty forest trees. Where you are not threading the narrow alleys of the more thickly inhabited quarters, you will be winding by irregular ways, deep in white dust, by the side of swirling water or within hearing of its murmur beyond the bulwark which screens the orchard from the lane. But from the standpoint of the roof the horizon expands to boundaries which are so remote that they are scarcely conceivable by a European mind. The foliage or the hollow of the site eliminates the middle distance; and the opposite piles of Great Ararat in the south (Fig. [40]) and of Alagöz in the north (Fig. [41]) rise immediately from the soft foreground of the embowered houses. The landscape from the high ground on the north, as you approach Erivan by the road from Tiflis, is difficult to forget (Fig. [42]). The whole fabric of Ararat is exposed from base to summits; but so tall are the poplars and luxuriant the countless varieties of fruit trees, that they almost conceal the domes of the mosques and the cupolas of the churches, spread over the straggling township at your feet.
Fig. 41. Alagöz from a house-top in Erivan.
All this verdure is mainly due to the river Zanga, the Hrazdan of the Armenians, which collects the drainage of a section of the southern slopes of the border range, and which is fed by the waters of Lake Sevan, called also Gökcheh, from its sky-blue colour, and by Armenian writers the Lake of Gegham. This beautiful alpine sea is surrounded by lofty mountains and has an area 2½ times as large as that of Geneva. It produces salmon trout of delicious flavour which are seldom absent from the bill of fare in the provincial capital. It finds an outlet through the Zanga into the Araxes at a difference in the level of 3600 feet. The brawling Zanga, already weakened by the canals which diffuse its waters, pursues a devious course at the foot of high and rocky banks on the western outskirts of the town. Further eastwards the irrigation is supplied by the Kirk Bulakh, a stream of which the name signifies forty springs, and which has its sources at no great distance from Erivan. Such abundance of running water should secure to this growing city a large measure of prosperity under settled government. As the centre of the most populous of the Armenian provinces of the Russian Empire, to which it gives its name, it is already a place of some pretensions. But the inhabitants do not at present number more than 15,000, of whom half are Tartars and half Armenians. This total also comprises about 300 Russians, whose most conspicuous units are the drivers of the carriages on hire, belonging, I believe, exclusively to the Molokan sect.[1]
