Note 1 — Chapter IV · VAN

How strange it seems that at the end of the nineteenth century one should be engaged in exploring and mapping this fine country, one of the fairest and most favoured of the Old World! How should we be able to explain, still less to justify, the circumstance to some visitor from another planet? It lies about in the centre of the land area of our hemisphere; the climate is bracing, water is abundant, the sun is warm. Yet it is so little known to the more civilised peoples that their travellers journey thither with the aid of a compass through districts which are now deserts, but which are well capable of supporting the races that are highest in the human scale. The case would appear to have been much the same during the period of the expansion of Greek culture and of the later and beneficent sway of Rome. The knowledge displayed of these regions by representative writers like Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy is, to say the best of it, vague and fabulous. Yet Strabo, the contemporary of Augustus, was a native of Asia Minor; the countrymen of Pliny had carried the Roman eagles to the Araxes; and Ptolemy wrote during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian whose statue, commemorating his journey through the interior, looked out upon the waves above Trebizond. The first of these authorities plainly confuses the position of Lake Urmi with that of Lake Van; but he is well acquainted with the essential characteristics of both sheets of water, different and strongly marked as these are. The former is described as largest in area, and second in size to the sea of Azof; its name is interpreted to signify the deep blue (κυανῆ ἑρμηνευθεῖσα). The water is salt; and there are salt works in the neighbourhood.1 The peculiar properties which actually distinguish the latter exactly tally with the language of Strabo, who, speaking next of the lake Arsene or Thopitis, says that it is charged with nitre, which word would seem with him to signify carbonate of soda,2 and that it washes clothes as though they had been scoured. He adds that the water is undrinkable and supports only one kind of fish. And he proceeds to relate a circumstance which is repeated and embroidered by Pliny, and which is so curious that I cannot refrain from extracting the whole passage from the work of the last-named writer.3