The first recorded ascent of the great mountain which is an object of
veneration to all the races who inhabit Asia Minor, however various
they may be in blood, in customs, and in creeds; the mountain to which
tradition assigns the resting of the Ark from its floating above the
ruins of a drowned world, and at whose foot at this present time three
empires meet, took place in 1829. Ararat was then ascended by Dr
Frederick Parrot, a Russo-German Professor in the university of Dorpat,
after whom is named one of the pinnacles of Monte Rosa. After two
unsuccessful attempts, the Professor reached the top of the mountain
with a party of three Armenians and two Russian soldiers. The second
ascent was made in 1834 by Spassky-Altonomof, who went up in order
to ascertain whether it was really true that the stars are visible
at noon from the tops of the highest mountains. The third was made
by Herr Abich in 1845. General Chodzko, while conducting the survey
of Transcaucasia, reached the top with a large party in 1850, and
remained there for a week in a tent pitched on the snow. And a party
of Englishmen—who, however, believed that they were the first who had
accomplished the feat—ascended from the Turkish side in 1856.
Yet, though these several exploits are perfectly proven to the European
world, Mr James Bryce tells us in his _Transcaucasia and Ararat_
(London: Macmillan & Co.), that ‘there is not a person living within
sight of Ararat, unless possibly some exceptionally educated Russian
official in Erivan, who believes that any human foot since Father
Noah’s has trodden that sacred summit.’
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.’
The traveller himself could not put into words the wonder and awe with
which he was filled by the spectacle which lay before him. We can
only indicate the chief features of that astonishing panorama, which
included Kazbek and Elbruz, the latter two hundred and eighty miles
away, and had the Caspian Sea upon its dim horizon. The mountains of
Daghestan, the extinct volcano of Ala Goz, Erivan with its orchards
and its vineyards, Araxes like a silver thread, the Taunus ranges and
Bingol Dagh, the great Russian fortress of Alexandropol, and Kars,
its enemy then, now in Russian hands. Two hundred miles away could be
faintly descried the blue tops of the Assyrian mountains of Southern
Kurdistan, ‘mountains that look down on Mosul and those huge mounds of
Nineveh by which the Tigris flows.’ Below and around, included in this
single view, seemed to lie the whole cradle of the human race, ‘from
Mesopotamia in the south to the great wall of the Caucasus that covered
the northern horizon, the boundary of the civilised world.’ No wonder
that looking on such a scene, a solitary man should feel terrified at
his own insignificance. ‘Nature,’ says the traveller, ‘sits enthroned,
serenely calm, upon this hoary pinnacle, and speaks to her children
only in the storm and earthquake that level their dwellings in the
dust.’
No wonder the solitary man could take no heed of time until, while
the eye was still unsatisfied with gazing, the curtain of mist closed
again, and, says the author, ‘I was left alone in this little plain
of snow, white, silent, and desolate, 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.’
Mr Bryce accomplished the descent speedily and safely, reaching the
encampment at six o’clock in the evening. Two days later, he and his
friend went to visit the Armenian monastery of Etchmiadzin, near the
northern foot of Ararat, and were presented to the Archimandrite.
Here is Mr Bryce’s pithy account of the interview: ‘It came out in
conversation that we had been on the mountain, and the Armenian
gentleman who was acting as interpreter turned to the Archimandrite,
and said: “This Englishman says he has ascended to the top of Massis
(Ararat).” The venerable man smiled sweetly. “No,” he replied; “that
cannot be. No one has ever been there. It is impossible.”’