Note 1 — Chapter II · ASCENT TO ARMENIA

On the side of Georgia there are two principal approaches to Armenia, and the traveller who desires to consult his comfort may be advised to restrict his choice to these two roads. The more westerly ascends the valley of the Kur river and reaches the highlands about Akhaltsykh by the romantic gorge and passage of Borjom; the other, further east, leaves the railway between the Black Sea and the Caspian at the station of Akstafa, some fifty miles below Tiflis, and, mounting from the trough of the Kur along the course of the Akstafa, issues upon the open country on the west of Lake Sevan, near the posting-stage of Delijan.1 A bifurcation at that point leads by one branch to Alexandropol and by the other to Erivan. You may ride in a victoria and with relays of post-horses on either of these roads. Both conduct you from the steppes at the southern foot of Caucasus and from levels that are comparatively low across or aslant the grain of the peripheral ranges to the edge of the Armenian tableland. Those ranges are the continuation upon the east of the mountains which we have followed from the Bosphorus to Batum; they stand up like a wall from the flats of the Rion and from the plains which border the lower course of the Kur, with much the same appearance as we saw them rise with ever-increasing proportions along the floor of the Black Sea. Beyond those lowlands a mighty neighbour, the parallel chain of Caucasus, faces them on the north. Only at one point do these two great systems join hands together, in the belt of mountainous country which separates the watershed of the Kur from that of the Rion and which the railway crosses by the pass of Suram (about 3000 feet). This linking chain is known to geographers under the name of the Meschic or Moschic; geologists are inclined to connect it with the structure of Caucasus; our senses might invest it with a separate existence, a transverse barrier as it were, thrown from range to range across the hollow which extends from sea to sea.