[19] The reader of early travels in the East will be familiar with the figure of the European watch and clock maker, to whom he is introduced in some distant city of Asia. [↑]
CHAPTER IV
VAN
Of the various sites which one might select upon the shores of the lake of Van, none would present as great advantages for a populous and self-contained settlement as that of the city from which it derives its name. The great range along the southern coast leaves little respite of even land between the waves and the parapet of rock. The opposite margin of the bosom of waters is filled with the fabrics of those huge volcanoes, Nimrud and Sipan. Sipan, indeed, upon nearer acquaintance, is robbed of some of his apparent extension; and the low outlines on the west and east of the dome-shaped mass upon the horizon will be recognised to belong to a belt of limestone with intrusive igneous rocks which the traveller follows all the way from Akhlat to Adeljivas, and upon which the volcano has built itself up. But those hills, which from the neighbourhood of Van seem to constitute the train of Sipan, are at once rugged and approach closely to the shore. Arjish alone is backed by a zone of fairly even and fertile country; while, as regards the coast between Van and the mouth of the Bendimahi Chai, I do not know that it has ever harboured a considerable city. On the other hand, the alluvial plain which is confined by Mount Varag upon the east, and which may be said to extend from a headland near the village of Kalajik on the north to the high ground just north of Artemid upon the south, affords a considerable area of rich soil, capable under irrigation of producing the choicest fruits of the earth.
Of the beauty of the site it would not be possible to speak too highly; but I tremble to provoke in my English reader a nausea of descriptive writing. The Armenians have a proverb which is often quoted: Van in this world and paradise in the next. The comparison might be justified under happier human circumstances, the perversity of man having converted this heaven into a little hell. Its aptness may be recognised during the course of a walk in the neighbourhood, or from the standpoint of the rock which supports the citadel. In the north across the waters is outspread an Italian landscape—a Vesuvius or an Etna, with their sinuous surroundings, on an Asiatic scale. Nearer at hand and fully exposed, the long barrier of the Kurdish mountains recalls the wildest scenery of the Norwegian coast. From the city herself as from the extremities of the wide basin, the short, sharp ridge of Varag is seen with pleasure to the eye, lifted some 4500 feet above the waters, and, at evening, reflecting the sunset in the most varied hues. The lake is not sufficiently large to separate these various objects by distances which preclude under ordinary conditions the simultaneous enjoyment of the beauty of all from a single shore. And it is large enough to spread at their feet with all the qualities of the ocean—the depth and vastness and changing surface of the high seas.
I.—The Lake of Van
It is about six times as large as the lake of Geneva, having an area of some 1300 square miles. Its western shore is erroneously laid down in existing maps; and this necessitated a particular survey of that region during my second journey, the result of which has been to invest the lake with a shape of greater symmetry—a central body with two arms, one on the north-east, the other on the south-west. The remainder of the outline I have borrowed from the best available sources, adapting them to the position of Van, of which the latitude and longitude are approximately known, and correcting them as well as possible by sketches, and readings to the principal points from the summit of Sipan. If my reader will turn to the map which accompanies this work he will, I think, be able to transfer, with the aid of a few illustrations, the features which are there conventionally delineated into a picture visible by the mind’s eye.
How strange it seems that at the end of the nineteenth century one should be engaged in exploring and mapping this fine country, one of the fairest and most favoured of the Old World! How should we be able to explain, still less to justify, the circumstance to some visitor from another planet? It lies about in the centre of the land area of our hemisphere; the climate is bracing, water is abundant, the sun is warm. Yet it is so little known to the more civilised peoples that their travellers journey thither with the aid of a compass through districts which are now deserts, but which are well capable of supporting the races that are highest in the human scale. The case would appear to have been much the same during the period of the expansion of Greek culture and of the later and beneficent sway of Rome. The knowledge displayed of these regions by representative writers like Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy is, to say the best of it, vague and fabulous. Yet Strabo, the contemporary of Augustus, was a native of Asia Minor; the countrymen of Pliny had carried the Roman eagles to the Araxes; and Ptolemy wrote during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian whose statue, commemorating his journey through the interior, looked out upon the waves above Trebizond. The first of these authorities plainly confuses the position of Lake Urmi with that of Lake Van; but he is well acquainted with the essential characteristics of both sheets of water, different and strongly marked as these are. The former is described as largest in area, and second in size to the sea of Azof; its name is interpreted to signify the deep blue (κυανῆ ἑρμηνευθεῖσα). The water is salt; and there are salt works in the neighbourhood.[1] The peculiar properties which actually distinguish the latter exactly tally with the language of Strabo, who, speaking next of the lake Arsene or Thopitis, says that it is charged with nitre, which word would seem with him to signify carbonate of soda,[2] and that it washes clothes as though they had been scoured. He adds that the water is undrinkable and supports only one kind of fish. And he proceeds to relate a circumstance which is repeated and embroidered by Pliny, and which is so curious that I cannot refrain from extracting the whole passage from the work of the last-named writer.[3]