Note 7 — Chapter IV · VAN

But both Urmi and Gökcheh sink into obscurity when compared to the lake of Van. Almost as large as the one and perhaps deeper than the other, it at once combines some of the characteristics of either basin and adds others essentially its own. Like Urmi its waters are heavily charged, though with soda rather than with salt. Its great elevation and its juxtaposition to the mountains of the peripheral region recall corresponding features in Gökcheh. But like a book which may borrow much from the work of other writers, and yet produce an effect on the reader which is wholly new, so one opens the landscape of Lake Van with that particular emotion which only very beautiful and original objects can produce. With the wondrous pieces of natural architecture about the margins of this inland sea my reader will become perfectly familiar as this work proceeds. My present object is to fly very low to the ground, and to notice such facts as appeal to the mind rather than to the eye. The extreme length of the lake would seem to measure 78 miles, and the breadth from north to south of the principal body about 32 miles. To all appearance it is very deep except at the north-east and south-west extremities; but no systematic soundings have been taken to my knowledge, though it would be extremely interesting to know whether indications can be traced of the Arjish arm having once composed a separate unit. The principal streams enter the easterly portion of the basin; they are the Erishat or Irshat near Akantz, the Bendimahi Chai, the Marmed and the Khoshab. Several little rivers are collected in the delta below the old Akhlat, and quite a nice stream cascades into the lake at the neighbouring village of Karmuch, which probably collects a portion of the drainage of the plain between Nimrud and Lake Nazik. No issue of the sea has yet been discovered. None of the copious springs which feed the Tigris on the southern side of the parapet of mountain, quite close to the flood washing its northern slopes, has yet been shown to possess any of the strongly marked qualities characteristic of the waters of Lake Van. One of the most remarkable of these springs is situated near the south-west corner of the lake, at Sach in the Güzel Dere or beauteous valley—a valley with a specially appropriate name.7 It has been examined by Major Maunsell, who describes it as issuing from the base of a cliff and immediately constituting a stream 50 yards wide and 18 inches deep. It is quite possible that this source of the Tigris may have given colour to the belief of the ancients that the river flowed through the lake and found an exit at its further end by an underground channel. Another scarcely less interesting fountain in the neighbourhood is that of Norshen at the head of the plain of Mush. It rises in a circular pool with a diameter of 105 feet, from which it wells over into a stream which runs to the Euphrates. The natives hold that it is in connection with the lake in the crater of Nimrud, and relate how a shepherd, whose staff, weighted with a small parcel of coin, had sunk below the surface of that deep mere, had one day been astonished to see the lost object eddying in the current of the pool of Norshen. Careful scrutiny of the spring during my second journey established the conviction that it affords no outlet to Lake Van. Moreover, its position and the delicious flavour of its water point to its being derived from the limestones of the range on the south of the plain.