Note 17 — Chapter XXI · GEOGRAPHICAL
Reading edition
The vine flourishes and is cultivated in these plains of the Araxes, and fields of castor-oil plant grace the ground. Such oases with thriving villages soften the lap of the landscape, and diversify the wide stretches of rich but idle soil which the network of trenches with their fertilising waters have not yet reached. Irrigation rather than rainfall is here the productive agency; and, indeed, this valley, with a yearly rainfall of only about six inches, is probably the driest throughout Russian Transcaucasia. The storms of the Pontic region spend themselves before reaching this haven; but they beat against the volcanoes of the meridional water-parting on the easterly margin of the more northerly sphere. Even at Alexandropol the yearly rainfall is almost three times as great as in the neighbourhood of Ararat. And while the climate of the city on the Arpa may compare with St. Lawrence in North America, that of Erivan resembles Palermo or Barcelona.17