MR. BRYCE'S ASCENT OF MOUNT ARARAT.
FROM the plain of the Araxes, where the Armenians place the lost Paradise of man, rises an extinct volcano, of im- measurable antiquity, its peak, 17,000 feet high, soaring suddenly from the platform, which 18 but two or three thousand feet above the sea ; its snow-line at the elevation of 14,000 feet, treeless, waterless, solemn, and solitary, one of the sublimest objects on the face of the earth. It is Ararat, the mountain of the Ark, the ancient sanctuary of the Armenian faith, the centre of the once famous kingdom, now the corner-stone of three great
Little Ararat, the
Ptehaek1Shah, the territories empires. " On the topeofo suitsitanlwanera
dominions of the Czar, th
of the three chief forms of faith that possess Western and Northern Asia, converge to a point. When in 1828 the Czar Nicholas defeated the Persians and annexed the territory round Erivan, his advisers insisted on bringing Ararat within the Russian territory, on account of the veneration wherewith it is regarded by all the surrounding races, and which is reflected on the Sovereign who possesses it." No mountain save Sinai has such sacred asso- ciations, and Sinai itself has less of legendary tore attached to it. Persians, Tartars, Turks, and Kurds regard the mountain with reverence as genuine as that of the Christian races, for its majesty, its solitariness, and because they all believe in the Deluge and in the Patriarch, " faithful found." They are all equally persuaded that mania " is "inaccessible ;" they are not to be convinced by any testimony, ascendednotthatofArarParartotin, o1f8A29, fto1n8o3m4, and of, or of Abieh—who respectively
1845—of General Choazk and his party, and the Englishmen who ascended in 1856; and it now appears that they reject that of Mr. Bryce, who performed, in September of last year, the extra- ordinary feat of ascending the mountain of the Ark, alone.
The narrative of Mr. Bryce's ascent fills one with wonder and delight, fires ones imagination like an astronomic discovery, and communicates to one something of the thrill and awe of the loneliness and immutability of the scene on which the solitary man gazed, when he stood on the little plain of snow which forms the summit of Ararat, "with a vividly-bright green sky above it, and a wild west wind whistling across it, clouds girding it in, and ever and anon through the clouds glimpses of far- stretching valleys and mountains away to the world's end." It was only from dawn till dark, but an immeasurable experience, one of those which seem to free the spirit from bonds of time and space, lay between those boundaries, for him who left on the plain and on the lower slopes of the mountain scenes such as they had wit- nessed from immemorial time, the nomad Kurds "watering their flocks at the spring, pitching their goat's-hair tents in the re- cesses of the lonely rocks, chanting their wildly pathetic airs, with neither a past to remember nor a future to plan for,"—and who climbed, with body and mind strained to the utmost pitch of exertion and excitement, to that platform of eternal snow, to stand, a feeble, solitary, exulting, cowering atom in the vastness, between the cloud-veil of Ararat and the light- flooded sky.
Mr. Bryce had sot out on the ascent from Aralykh, with a com- panion and an escort of six armed Cossacks, accompanied by an interpreter ; but the Cossacks failed them early in the under- taking, having no notion of the importance of time, no notion of carrying baggage, and a propensity, perfectly good-humoured, bat ruinous to the purpose of the expedition, to sit still, smoke, and chatter. The interpreter was obliged to abandon the party at Sardarbulah, or "the Governor's Well," the only high permanent camping-ground on the mountain, and the one spot in all the landscape where there are trees. IrVith their companions the travellers had thenceforth no means of com- munication, and they were at their mercy completely, yet they felt no fear of them, and incurred no danger from either Kurds or Cossacks, only after a certain point both became equally useless as guides, for the former never go higher on the mountain than the limits of pasture, and the latter have no motive to go nearly so high. When they had reached a height of 12,000 feet, and everything lay below them, except Little Ararat opposite, and the stupendous cone that rose from where the friends were sitting, its glittering snows and stern black crags of lava standing up perfectly clear in a sea of cloudless blue ; when they had noted the landmarks carefully, and agreed to meet about nightfall at that spot, having a notion that the Cossacks, who were now widely scattered about the slope, would at least bring them safely down into the plain, the travellers parted, and Mr. Bryce commenced his solitary ascent of the awful peak, held by the Armenians to be guarded by angels from the profaning foot of man, and by the Kurds to be the haunt of Jinn who take vengeance on mere human disturbers of their devil's revelry. At eight o'clock be started, carrying with him his ice-axe, some crusts of bread, a lemon, a small flask of cold tea, four hard-boiled eggs, and a few meat lozenges, on the perilous journey, whose dangers were of that most formid- able kind, the unknown, and climbing away to the left along the top of a ridge, came to a snow-bed, lying over loose, broken stones and sand, so fatiguing to cross that he almost gave in on the far side of it. There he found solid rock, however, and the summit of Little Ararat began to sink, and that meant real progress. At ten o'clock he was looking down upon its small flat top, studded with lumps of rock, but bearing no trace of a crater. Up to this point one Cossack and one Kurd had accompanied him—they were mightily amused by the ice-axe, and curious as to its use—but the Kurd stopped now, shivering on the verge of a long, treacherous snow-slope, in which steps had to be cut ; and afterwards the Cos- sack, who had crossed the snow-slope, looked up at the broken cliff above them which had then to be scaled, and shook his head. Mr. Bryce made him understand by pantomime that he was to return to the bivouac below, bade him farewell, and set his face to the great peak, Little•Amrat now lying 1,000 feet below the eye. He climbed the crags which had appalled the Cossack, and emerged on a straight slope of volcanic stones, which rolled about so that he slipped down nearly as much as he went up ; and here the breathlessness and fatigue became extreme, owing to the thinness of the air ; and "the practical question was whether, with knees of lead, and gasping like a fish in a boat, he would be able to get any farther." There was no rashness in Mr. Bryce's great courage. He sat down, ate an egg, and resolved that when three o'clock should come, or he should come to a "bad place," he would turn back, let the summit be ever so near. And as there is no more brag about his story than there was rashness in his courage, he says simply that such was the exhaustion of his legs
and his lungs, the bad place or three o'clock would have been almost welcome.
Going on again, he turned and got on another rock-rib, working his laborious way over toppling crags of lava, until perhaps the grandest sight of the whole mountain presented itself. At his foot 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 to- wards 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. Had a Kurd ever travelled so far, he might have taken this for the Palace of the Jinn. Then came the struggle between the imagination, longing to feast itself upon the majesty and the wonder of the scene, and the exigencies of the tremendous task of the ascent ; Mr. Bryce found that the strain on the observing senses seemed too great for fancy or emotion to have any scope. This was a race against time, in which he could only scan the cliffs for a route, refer constantly to his watch, husband his strength by morsels of food taken at frequent inter- vals, and endeavour to conceive how a particular block or bit of slope would look when seen the other way in descending. Climbing on and on, sometimes erecting little piles of stones to mark the way, like Poucet without his brothers ; so absorbed that the solemn grandeur of the scenery impressed him less than on many less striking mountains, the solitary traveller consumed the precious hours until he found himself at the top of the rock-rib, and on the edge of a precipice, which stopped farther progress in that direction, but showed him, through the clouds which floated around him—real clouds, not generally diffused mist—the summit barely 1,000 feet above him. To accomplish that distance, he had to choose between two courses, both almost impracticable ; the first was to return to the long slopes of rolling stones which he had deserted, get up the cliffs at the top, and so on to the upper slopes of rock or inclined snow which lead to the summit. This involved a renewal of the terrible labour he had already found almost un- endurable. The second was to turn back and descend into a vast snow-basin, lying south-east of the summit, and whose north-west acclivity formed, in fact, its side ; which was so steep as to require step-cutting, and a "likely place for crevasses." The hours were wearing on ; a night upon the mountain would probably mean death to the brave man (whose clothing was insufficient even for the day-time, for his overcoat had been stolen on a Russian rail- way) ; the decision had to be quickly taken. He decided for the snow-basin, retraced his steps from the precipice, climbed into the basin along the border of a treacherous ice-slope, and attacked the friable rocks, so rotten that neither feet nor hands could get firm hold, floundering pitiably, because too tired for a rush. All the way up this rock-slope, where the strong sulphureous smell led Mr. Bryce to hope he should find some trace of an eruptive vent, it was so "delightfully volcanic," but where he only found lumps of minerals and a piece of gypsum with fine crystals, he was constantly gazing at the upper end of the toilsome road for signs of crags or snow-fields above. But a soft mist-curtain huffg there, where the snow seemed to begin, and who could tell what lay beyond ? The solitude must indeed have been awful then, for everything like certainty and calculation had ceased. From the tremendous height, Little Ararat, lying he did not know how many thousands of feet beneath hitn, looked to the climber like a broken obelisk. And he could only imagine the plain, a misty, dream- like expanse below. Did he dare to think of the human life, of the peaceful tents, the cheerful fires, the voices away there in the depths of distance, as he stood alone amid the eternal snow, with mists to the left and above him, and a range of black precipices which shut in the view upon the right, and just below him clouds seething like waves about the savage pinnacles, the towers of the palace of the Jinn, past which his upward path had lain. Only one hour was before him now ; at its end he must turn back,—if, indeed, his strength could hold out for that other hour. IIe struggled on up the crumbling rocks, now to the right, now to the left, as the foothold looked a little firmer on either side, until suddenly the rock-slope came to an end, and he stepped out upon the almost level snow at the top of it into the clouds, into the teeth of the strong west wind, into cold so great that an icicle enveloped the lower half of his face at once, and did not melt until four hours afterwards. He tightened-in his loose light coat with a Spanish neck-scarf, and walked straight on over the snow, following the rise, seeing only about thirty yards ahead of him, in the thick mist. Time was flying ; if the invisible summit of the Mountain of the Ark were indeed far off now, if this gentle rise stretched on and on, that summit must remain un- eeen by him who had dared and done so great a feat that he might Look from its sacred eminence. He trailed the point of the ice-axe in the soft snow, to mark the backward track, for there was no longer any landmark, all was cloud on every side. Suddenly he felt with amazement that the ground was falling away to the north, and be stood still. A puff of the west wind drove away the mists on the opposite side to that by which he had come, and his eyes rested on the Paradise plain, at an abysmal depth below. The solitary traveller stood on the top of Mount Ararat, with the history of the world spread beneath his gaze, and all around him a scene which reduced that history to pigmy proportions, and man himself to infinite littleness.
Mr. Bryce ha% given to the world a wonderful word-picture of that amazing and awful spectacle, of that "landscape which is now what it was before man crept forth on the earth, the mountains which stand about the valleys as they stood when the volcanic fires that piled them up were long ago extin- guished ;" but he could not tell us what were his thoughts, his feelings there, what the awe and yearning that came over him in that tremendous solitude, where "Nature sits enthroned, serenely calm, and speaks to her children only in the storm and earthquake that level their dwellings in the dust." His vision ranged over the vast expanse, within whose bounds are the chain of the Can- ■ CaSUS, dimly made out, but Kazbek, Elbruz, and the mountains of Daghestan visible, with the line of the Caspian Sea upon the horizon ; to the north, the huge extinct volcano of Ala Giiz, whose three peaks enclose a snow-patched ciater, the dim plain of Erivan, with the silver river winding through it ; westward, the Taurus ranges ; and north-west, the upper valley of the Araxes, to be traced as far as Ani, the ancient capital of the Armenian kingdom ; the great Russian fortress of Alexandropol, and the hill where Kars stands,—peaceful enough when the brave climber looked out upon this wonderful spectacle. While it was growing upon him, not indeed in magnificence, but in comprehensibility, "while the eye was still unsatisfied with gazing," the mist-curtain dropped, enfolded him, and shut him up alone with the awful mountain- top. "The awe that fell upon me," he says, "with the sense of utter loneliness, made time pass unnoticed, and I might have lin- gered long in a sort of dream, had not the piercing cold that thrilled through every limb recalled me to a sense of the risks delay might involve." Only four hours of daylight remained, the thick mist was an added danger, the ice-axe marks were his only guide, for the compass is useless on a volcanic moun- tain like Ararat, with ircn in the rocks. The descent was made in safety, but by the time Mr. Bryce came in sight of the spot, yet far off, where his friend had halted, "the sun had got behind the south-western ridge of the mountain, and his gigantic shadow bad fallen across the great Araxes plain below ; while the red mountains of Media, far to the south-east, still glowed redder than ever, then turned swiftly to a splendid purple in the dying light." At six o'clock he reached the bivouac, and rejoined his friend, who must have looked with strange feelings into the eyes which had looked upon such wondrous sights since sunrise. Three days later, Mr. Bryce was at the Armenian monastery of Etchmiadzin, near the northern foot of Ararat, and was presented to the archimandrite who rules the house. " This Englishman," said the Armenian gentleman who was acting as interpreter, "says he has ascended to the top of Massie (Ararat). The venerable man smiled sweetly, and replied with gentle decisiveness, "That cannot be. No one has ever been there. It is impossible."
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