Erzeroom is by common consent in these parts the very site of the Garden of Eden. For many centuries, affirms the Moslem, the flowers of Paradise might yet be seen blossoming round the source of the Euphrates not far from the town. But, alas! when the great Persian King Khosref Purveez, the rival of the above-mentioned Ferdad, was encamped in that neighbourhood, he was rash enough to spurn a message from the young Prophet Mohammed, offering him protection if he would embrace the faith of Islâm. What booted the protection of an insignificant sectary to him? thought the Shah-in-Shah, and tossed the letter into the Euphrates. But Nature, horrified at the sacrilegious deed, dried up her flowers and fruits, and even parched the sources of the river itself; the last relic of Eden became a waste. There is a plaintive Armenian elegy composed in the person of Adam sitting at the gate of Paradise, and beholding Cherubim and Seraphim entering the Garden of which he once was king, "yea, like unto a powerful king!" The poet puts into Adam's mouth a new line of defence; he did not eat of the fruit, he says, until after he had witnessed its fatal effects upon Eve, when, seeing her despoiled of all her glory, he was touched with pity, and tasted the immortal fruit in the hope that the Creator contemplating them both in the same wretched plight might with paternal love take compassion on both. But vain was the hope; "the Lord cursed the serpent and Eve, and I was enslaved between them." "O Seraphim!" cries the exiled father of mankind:
When ye enter Eden, shut not the gate of Paradise; place me standing at the gate; I will look in a moment, and then bring me back.
Ah! I remember ye, O flowers and sweet-swelling fountains. Ah! I remember ye O birds, sweet-singing--and ye, O beasts:
Ye who enjoy Paradise, come and weep over your king; ye who are in Paradise planted by God, elected from the earth of every kind and sort.
High above the hardiest saxifrage tower the three thousand feet of everlasting snows that crown Mount Ararat. The Armenians call it Massis or "Mother of the World," and old geographers held that it was the centre of the earth, an hypothesis supported by various ingenious calculations. The Persians have their own set of legends about it; they say that Ararat was the cradle of the human race, and that at one time it afforded pasture up to the apex of its dome; but upon man's expulsion from Eden, Ahriman the serpent doomed the whole country to a ten months' winter. As to the semi-scriptural traditions gathered round the mountain, there is no end to them. "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat," so says the Bible, and it is an article of faith with the Armenian peasant that it is still somewhere up at the top, only not visible. He is extremely loth to believe that anybody has actually attained the summit. Parrot's famous ascent was long regarded as the merest fable. At the foot of Ararat was a village named Argoory, or "he planted the vine," where Noah's vineyard is pointed out to this day, though the village itself was destroyed in 1840, when the mountain woke up from its long slumbers and rolled down its side a stream of boiling lava; but we are told that, owing to the sins of the world, the vines no longer bear fruit. Close at hand is Manard, "the mother lies here," alluding to the burial-place of Noah's wife, and yonder is Eravan or "Visible," the first dry land which Noah perceived as the waters receded. Armenian choniclers relate that when after leaving the ark the descendants of Noah dispersed to different quarters, one amongst them, by name Haig, the great-grandson of Japhet, settled with his family in Mesopotamia, where he probably took part in the building of the Tower of Babel. Later, however, upon Belus acquiring dominion over the land, Haig found his rule so irksome to himself and his clan that they migrated back in a body of 300 persons to Armenia, much to the displeasure of Belus, who summoned them to return, and when they refused, despatched a large army to coerce them into obedience. Haig collected his men on the shores of Van, and thus sagaciously addressed them: