1876 British Viscount & Ambassador James Bryce - Noah's Ark Search

154 THE EXPLORERS OF ARARAT
rebuilt by Tiridates, a protégé of Nero’s, under the name of Neronia. When, about A.D. 370, it was again taken and
burnt by the Persians, it is said to have contained a population of 200,000 total, 40,000 of them Jews.
At Aralykh we were received with the utmost courtesy by the officer in command, Colonel Temirhan Aktolovitch
Shipshef, a Mohammedan noble from the Kabarda, on the north side of the Caucasus, and a man of many and varied
accomplishments. At night, it was terribly hot, for we were enjoined to keep the windows shut to avoid the feverproducing
miasma from the adjoining marshes. Even our concentrated solution of carbolic acid, though it was strong
enough to burn a hole in my forehead, did not wholly repel the mosquitoes whom these marshes rear. Concerning
Ararat we had much discourse, the upshot of which was that nobody at Aralykh knew anything of former ascents, nor
of how it ought to be attacked, but that we should have horses and Cossacks to take us to Sardarbulakh [Serdabulak
in later times], a small military outpost high up on the way which leads over the pass between Great and Little Ararat to
Bayazid, and as much farther as horses or Cossacks could go. A day, however, was needed to make preparations,
and while these went forward, we got the heads and spikes of our ice-axes fitted with shafts by a German carpenter
attached to the station, and rambled out under umbrellas over the slope that rose almost imperceptibly to the
southeast, an hour’s walking on which seemed to bring us no nearer to the mountain. It was an arid waste of white
volcanic ash or sand, covered with prickly shrubs, among which lizards and black scorpions wriggle about. We ought,
of course, to have gone—any energetic traveler would have gone—to examine the ruins of Artaxata, but the
overpowering heat and the weariness of the last few days and sleepless nights, which began to tell as soon as we
began to rest, made us too languid even for so obvious a duty. So we dawdled, and panted, and dozed, and watched
the clouds shift and break and form again round the solemn snowy cone till another evening descended and it glittered
clear and cold beneath the stars.
Chapter VI
None of the native peoples that behold from the surrounding plains and valleys the silvery crest of Ararat know it
by that name. The Armenians call it Massis, or Massis Ljarn (ljarn meaning “mountain”), a name which we may
connect with the Masius of Strabo (though his description of that mountain does not suit ours); the Tatars and Turks,
Aghri Dagh [Agri Dagi], which is interpreted as meaning “curved mountain,” or “painful mountain”; the Persians, Koh i
Nuh, “the mountain of Noah,” or, according to Sir John Chardin, Sahat Toppin, which he interprets to mean “the Happy
Hillock.” It has received among geographers the name of Ararat, which the Russian use is now beginning to spread in
the neighborhood, and which the ecclesiastics at Etchmiadzin have taken as the title of a monthly magazine they
publish, only from its identification with the Biblical mountain of the Ark, an identification whose history is curious.
The only topographical reference in the Scripture narrative of the Flood is to be found in the words, Genesis viii,
4,—“In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month,” “the Ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat,” which
may be taken as equivalent to “on a mountain of (or in ) Ararat.” The word Ararat is used in three, or rather two, other
places in Scripture. One is in 2 Kings xix. 37, and the parallel passage in Isaiah xxxvii. 38, where it is said of the sons
of Sennacherib, who had just murdered their father, that “they escaped into the land of Ararat,” rendered in our