The mountain, divided into two peaks called Great and Little Ararat, forms an elliptical mass of about twenty-five miles in length from north-west to south-east, and about half that width. ‘Little Ararat is an elegant cone or pyramid, rising with steep, smooth, regular sides into a comparatively sharp peak. Great Ararat is a huge broad-shouldered mass, more like a dome than a cone, supported by strong buttresses, and throwing out rough ribs or ridges of rock that stand out like knotty muscles, from its solid trunk.’
The latest mark which the hand of Nature has set upon this mighty mountain was made in 1840, and the story is a pathetic one. Near the mouth of the great chasm with its crown of tremendous precipices, there formerly stood a pleasant little Armenian village, of two hundred houses, named Aghurri. The dwellers there were pastoral people like their forefathers, who fed their flocks in the Alpine pastures, and cultivated a few fields which were watered by the glacier-stream. They claimed that the vine which bore these delicious grapes was Father Noah’s own, and that the ancient willow, the pride of the village, had sprung from one of the planks of the Ark. The little monastery of St Jacob had for eight hundred years stood just above the village, on the spot where the angel of the legend had appeared to the monk. With the exception of the wandering Kurds, the inhabitants of Aghurri were the only dwellers on the mountain; in their village its traditions centred, and there they were faithfully preserved. Thus Mr Bryce relates the fate of the happy mountain village: ‘Towards sunset in the evening of the 21st of June 1840, the sudden shock of an earthquake, accompanied by a subterranean roar, and followed by a terrific blast of wind, threw down the houses of Aghurri, and at the same moment detached enormous masses of rock with their superjacent ice from the cliffs that surround the chasm. A shower of falling rocks overwhelmed in an instant the village, the monastery, and a Kurdish encampment on the pastures above. Not a soul survived to tell the tale. Four days afterwards, the masses of snow and ice that had been precipitated into the glen suddenly melted, and forming an irresistible torrent of water and mud, swept along the channel of the stream and down the outer slopes of the mountain, far away into the Aras Plain, bearing with them huge blocks, and covering the ground for miles with a deep bed of mud and gravel.... Since then, a few huts have again arisen, somewhat lower down the slope than the site of old Aghurri; here dwell a few Tatars, and pasture their cattle on the sides of the valley, which grass has again begun to clothe. But Noah’s vine and the primeval willow, and the little monastery where Parrot lived so happily, among the few old monks who had retired to this hallowed spot from the troubles of the world, are gone for ever; no Christian bell is heard, no Christian service said upon the Mountain of the Ark.’
From the Russian station of Aralykh, on the line where the last and very gentle slope of Ararat melts into the perfectly flat bottom of the Araxes valley, Mr Bryce and his companion commenced their ascent of the mountain on the 11th of September 1876. The officer in command at Aralykh, a Mohammedan noble from the Caucasus, gave them horses and a mounted Cossack escort to take them to Sardarbulakh, a small military outpost on the pass between Great and Little Ararat. Past a Kurdish encampment and up a grassy slope the travellers ride to Sardarbulakh—‘the Governor’s Well’—a very pleasant frontier-post, but to them a place of refreshing indeed, though the beginning of troubles. Horses could go no farther, the necessaries for bivouac must be carried, and the Cossacks would not carry them. Kurds had to be procured and bargained with, a time-wasting process all the more trying to the travellers that they could not understand what was said on either side. The glorious snows were beckoning them, the precious minutes were flying, but there was nothing for it except patience.
At length it became evident that the travellers must camp at Sardarbulakh; neither Kurd nor Cossack would face the terrors of the mountain at night at an unfamiliar height. For the unforeseen annoyance there arose one unexpected item of consolation; a band of Kurds, who had just crossed the flanks of Little Ararat from Persia in search of fresher pasture, came up, driving their cattle to the Governor’s Well; and the travellers beheld, in the most ancient scene within the historic record, a picture which vividly reproduced the first simple life of the world. The well is an elliptical hollow three feet deep, surrounded by a loose wall of lumps of lava; troughs were set up all over the surrounding pasture. And Kurdish boys and girls went busily to work filling brazen bowls and carrying the water to the troughs, whence the sheep, small creatures like those of the Scotch Highlands, and the goats—‘exactly like the scapegoat of Mr Holman Hunt’s picture’—drank. For two hours the watering went on, and the boys and girls and women were so intent upon their work that they hardly glanced at the strangers from Frangistan, wonderfully foreign as the group must have been to them. Only a few men were of the nomad party, and they were armed; the women and girls were most picturesquely dressed, all unveiled, and each carried a distaff in one hand, with a lump of wool upon her wrist, and this they plied as they drove the flocks before them. Mr Bryce sketches the scene in eloquent words: ‘In the foreground were the beautiful flocks, the exquisite colours of the women’s dresses and ornaments, their own graceful figures, the stir and movement beside the clear pool, the expanse of rolling pasture around with its patch of tender little birchwood. On each side a towering cone rose to heaven, while in front the mountain slope swept down into the broad valley, and beyond, stern red mountains ranged away, ridge over ridge, to the eastern horizon, all bare and parched, with every peak and gully standing sharp out through the clear air, yet softened by distance into the most delicately rich and tender hues. Here, where a picture of primitive life close at hand was combined with a vision of broad countries, inhabited by many peoples, stretching out to the shores of the inland sea of Asia, one seemed at a glance to take in and realise their character and history, unchanging in the midst of change. Through the empires of Assyria and Persia and Macedon, through Parthian Arsacidæ and Iranian Sassanidæ, through the reigns of Arabian Califs and Turkish Sultans and Persian Shahs, these Kurds have roamed as they roam now, over the slopes of the everlasting mountains, watering their flocks at this spring, pitching their goats-hair tents in the recesses of these lonely rocks, chanting their wildly pathetic lays, with neither a past to remember nor a future to plan for.’
Among the many memories of his ascent of Mount Ararat, doubtless Mr Bryce will cherish that of the halt at the Governor’s Well with peculiar pleasure. The bivouac too in such a spot, and amid the astonishing silence of the mountains, where no torrents call to one another, no rills ripple, no boughs rustle, no stones slip and fall, must have been memorable too. At 1 A.M. the party started, thirteen in number, and made across grassy hollows for the ridges which trend up the great cone; the Kurds leading the way. The travellers’ hopes were high; the Kurds got on rapidly; their pace was better than that of the Swiss guides; but it soon slackened; and at the top of the first steep bit these sturdy fellows sat down to rest; and they repeated the performance every quarter of an hour, sitting seven or eight minutes each time, smoking and chattering, and utterly indifferent to gestures of remonstrance and appeals. The travellers could not make them understand their speech—the interpreter had left them at Sardarbulakh; ‘and,’ says Mr Bryce, ‘it was all very well to beckon them, or pull them by the elbow or clap them on the back; they thought this was only our fun, and sat still and chattered all the same.’
When daylight came the travellers began to despair, but also to enjoy the wonderful effects of light. At 3 A.M. they had seen the morning-star spring up from behind the Median mountains, shedding a light that almost outshone the moon. An hour later, there came upon the topmost slope of the cold and ghostly snows of the cone, six thousand feet above, a flush of pink. ‘Swiftly it floated down the eastern face, and touched and kindled the rocks above us,’ says the author; ‘and then the sun flamed out, and in a moment the Araxes valley and all the hollows of the savage ridges we were crossing were flooded with overpowering light.’ At six o’clock it became evident that neither Cossacks nor Kurds would go farther. Mr Bryce then resolved to leave them, to await his return or not as they pleased, and to make the ascent of the snow-cone alone; his friend, being unequal to the exertion, agreed to wait about and look out for him at nightfall. They had now reached a height of twelve thousand feet; everything, except Little Ararat opposite, lay below them; the awful cone rose there from where they sat, its glittering snows and stern black crags of lava standing up perfectly clear in a sea of cloudless blue; tempting indeed, but awe-inspiring too, for the summit was hidden behind the nearer slopes, and no one could tell what the difficulties of the ascent might be. The Kurds and the Cossacks knew nothing, and could not tell, if they had known anything on the subject.
At 8 A.M. Mr Bryce buckled on his canvas gaiters, put some meat lozenges, four hard-boiled eggs, a small flask of tea, some crusts of bread, and a lemon, into his pocket, bade his friend good-bye, and set off, accompanied, to his no small surprise, by two Cossacks (who had been much amused by the ice-axe) and one Kurd. After two hours’ climbing, only one Cossack remained with the daring mountaineer, and the courage of this worthy gave way before a terrible sheer cliff, which had to be reached by steps cut in the intervening snow. Mr Bryce bade him by signs return to the bivouac, and pressed on alone.
After two hours’ incessant toil up a straight slope of volcanic minerals, fragments of trachyte and other stones, which perpetually slipped under his foot and hand, it became a question whether the gasping climber could possibly reach the desired goal. He would not at all events give it up yet; and after a severe struggle with this decidedly bad bit, he got on to a rock rib, where he was revived by beholding a spectacle which he describes as perhaps the grandest on the whole mountain. ‘At my foot,’ he says, ‘was a deep, narrow, impassable gully, in whose bottom snow lay where the inclination was not too steep. Beyond it a line of rocky towers, red, grim, and terrible, ran right up towards the summit, its upper end lost in the clouds, through which, as at intervals they broke or shifted, one could descry, far, far above, a wilderness of snow.’
Having crossed the fissure, Mr Bryce began a tremendous climb along a slope of friable rocks which ran up till lost in clouds, and among which he was saluted by a violent sulphurous smell, which made him look for some trace of an eruptive vent, or at least for hot vapours betraying the presence of subterranean fires. Nothing of the kind is to be seen, however, and he attributes the smell to the natural decomposition of the trachytic rock, which is full of minute crystals of sulphide of iron. All the way up this rock-slope, the climber kept his eye fixed on its upper end, to see what signs there were of crags or snow-fields above. He was now thousands of feet above Little Ararat, which looked more like a broken obelisk than an independent summit twelve thousand eight hundred feet in height. ‘With mists to the left and above,’ he says, ‘and a range of black precipices cutting off all view to the right, there came a vehement sense of isolation and solitude, and I began to understand better the awe with which the mountain-silence inspires the Kurdish shepherds. Overhead, the sky had turned from dark blue to an intense bright green, a colour whose strangeness added to the weird terror of the scene.’
In another hour he must turn back, whether he should have gained the summit or not; to be overtaken by darkness upon the mountain would mean death; already he was suffering very severely from cold, and his strength was nearly exhausted. The rest must be told in his own simple forcible words: ‘At length the rock-slope came suddenly to an end, and I stepped out upon the almost level snow at the top of it, coming at the same time into the clouds, which cling to the colder surfaces.... In the thick mist the eye could pierce only some thirty yards ahead; so I walked on over the snow five or six minutes, following the rise of its surface, which was gentle, and fancying there might still be a good way to go. To mark the backward track, I trailed the point of the ice-axe along behind me in the soft snow, for there was no longer any landmark; all was closed on every side. Suddenly, to my astonishment, the ground began to fall away to the north; I stopped; a puff of wind drove off the mists on one side, the opposite side to that by which I had come, and shewed the Araxes Plain at an abysmal depth below. It was the top of Ararat.’