some take their departure, others make up couches on the floor with sheepskins and quilts.  Thin ice covers the still pools of water when I resume my toilsome route over the mountains at daybreak, a raw wind coines whistling from the east, and until the sun begins to warm things up a little, it is necessary to stop and buffet occasionally to prevent benumbed hands.  Obtaining some small lumps of wheaten dough cooked crisp in hot grease, like unsweetened doughnuts, from a horseman on the road, I push ahead toward the summit and then down the eastern slope of the mountains; rounding an abutting hill about 9.30, the glorious snow-crowned peak of Ararat suddenly bursts upon my vision; it is a good forty leagues away, but even at this distance it dwarfs everything else in sight.  Although surrounded by giant mountain chains that traverse the country at every conceivable angle, Ararat stands alone in its solitary grandeur, a glistening white cone rearing its giant height proudly and conspicuously above surrounding eminences; about mountains that are insignificant only in comparison with the white-robed monarch that has been a beacon-light of sacred history since sacred history has been in existence.

Descending now toward the Alashgird Plain, a prominent theatre of action during the war, I encounter splendid wheeling for some miles; but once fairly down on the level, cultivated plain, the road becomes heavy with dust.  Villages dot the broad, expansive plain in every direction; conical stacks of tezek are observable among the houses, piled high up above the roofs, speaking of commendable forethought for the approaching cold weather.  In one of the Armenian villages I am not a little surprised at finding a lone German; he says he prefers an agricultural life in this country with all its disadvantages, to the hard, grinding struggle for existence, and the compulsory military service of the Fatherland.  “Here,” he goes on to explain, “there is no foamy lager, no money, no comfort, no amusement of any kind, but there is individual liberty, and it is very easy making a living; therefore it is for me a better country than Deutschland.” " Everybody to their liking,” I think, as I continue on across the plain; but for a European to be living in one of these little agricultural villages comes the nearest to being buried alive of anything I know of.  The road improves in hardness as I proceed eastward, but the peculiar disadvantages of being a conspicuous and incomprehensible object on a populous level plain soon becomes manifest.  Seeing the bicycle glistening in the sunlight as I ride along, horsemen come wildly galloping from villages miles away.  Some of these wonderstricken people endeavor to pilot me along branch trails leading to their villages, but the main caravan trail is now too easily distinguishable for any little deceptiona of this kind to succeed.  Here, on the Alashgird Plain, I first hear myself addressed as “Hamsherri,” a term which