Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 June 1894 — ON TOP OF MT. ARARAT. [ARTICLE]

ON TOP OF MT. ARARAT.

Nothing but Snow Covers tho Peak Where the Ark Was Moored. “Mount Ararat has two tops, a few hundred yards apart, sloping, on tho eastern and western extremities, intorather prominent abutments, and separated by a snow valley, or depression, from 50 to 100 feet in depth. Thus, in the Century, writes Messrs. Allen and Sachtleben, the two youngAmericans who made a bicycle tour round the world. “The eastern top, on which wo were standing, was quite extensive, and 80 to 40 feet lower than its western neighbor. Both tops are hummocks on the huge dome of Ararat, like the humps on the back of a camel, on neither one of which, is there a vestige of anything buU snow. “There remained just as little trace of the crosses left by Parrot and Chodzko, as of the ark itself. We remembered the pictures we had. seen in our nursery-books, which represented this mountain-top covered' with green grass, and Noah stepping out of the ark, in the bright, warm sunshine, before the receding waves; and now we looked around and sew this very spot covered with perpetual snow. Nor did we see any evidence■ whatever of a former existing crater,, except perhaps the snow-filled depression we have just mentioned. There was nothing about this perpetual snow-field, and the freezing atmosphere that was chilling us to* the bone, to remind us that we were on the top of an extinct volcano that once trembled with the convulsions of subterranean heat. "The view from this towering height was immeasurably extensive, and almost too grand. All detail was lost—all color, all outline; even the surrounding mountains seemed, to be but excrescent ridges of the plain. Then, too, we could catch only occasional glimpses, as the clouds shifted to and fro. At one; time they opened up beneath us, and revealed the Aras valley with its glittering ribbon of silver at tat abyssmal depth below. Now and then we could descry the black volcanic peaks of Ali Ghez forty miles away to the northwest, and on the southwest. the low mountains that obscured the town of Bayazid. Of the Caucasus, the mountains about Erzerum on the west, and Lake Van on the south, and even the Caspian Sea, all of which are said to be in Ararat's, horizon, we could see absolutely nothing.”