Note 17 — Chapter XIII · THE HEART OF ARARAT

It is to the credit of the times in which we live that no such event could now occur in Russian territory without exhaustive and local scientific investigation, while the results of the catastrophe were still fresh. The task of reporting to the Government was entrusted to a Major of Engineers, who was ordered to open an enquiry on the spot. His account was to the effect that masses of rock were precipitated into the chasm from the overhanging heights; that they were accompanied in their descent by vast quantities of snow, unloosed by the sinking foundations of the uppermost seams. A river of boulders and snow and ice streamed with lightning rapidity down the gulf, buried the cloister and the village with all its inhabitants, and choked up the trough of the abyss. The earthquake was attended by the opening of fissures in the ground, from which there issued water and sand, and even flames.17 The mention of this last phenomenon appears to have aroused the curiosity of men of learning, and to have excited in them a strong desire for further light. The site was visited in 1843 by a German man of science, Dr. Wagner, and in 1844 by the great geologist Herrmann Abich, whose researches are always careful and complete.18 These two authorities unfortunately arrived at opposite conclusions as to the character of the convulsion. Wagner begins by discrediting the account of the Russian Major, and suggests that he had never left the walls of Erivan, having lost his travelling money at play. He considers it absurd to suppose that the mass which destroyed Akhury and the fragments of rocks which were projected far and wide can be attributed to the operation of purely seismic forces, dislocating the crown and sides of the abyss. They must have been due to eruptive volcanic action, of which he thought he could see the traces at the upper end of the chasm, the site, according to his view, of one of the old craters of Ararat. They were impelled through the air by steam and escaping gases from a fissure in the bottom of the ravine. We must therefore form the conception of an eruption accompanied by an earthquake, not of a landslip effected by seismic shocks.19