St. Thomas the Apostle once crossed the lake--on his way to India as local tradition has it--but in a fashion less laborious and odoriferous than did the scientist. He walked on the water's surface; a smaller miracle in this case than some parallels in the lives of the saints, yet no small portent all the same. In memory of it all Urmi comes down for a solemn and ceremonial bathe in the waters on the anniversary of the passage, the fifteenth day of August. Other folk have to cross in boats, usually the very clumsiest craft that swim on any sheet of water in the world, with masts built after the style of an old-fashioned bear's pole. With a strong wind dead astern, they move perhaps two miles an hour, and may get over in a day and a night. In any other case the sail is hauled down, and they wait for better times; so that the voyage of forty miles may last for a week or even more. Latterly, enterprise has risen to a steamer, plying between the ports of Urmi and Tabriz, and passing through the winding channel that divides the two principal islands of the lake, "Sheep Island" and "Donkey Island." With luck, this craft may manage the passage (on the rare occasions when the engine does not break down and have to be repaired _en route_) in six hours. The regular programme, however, is a doleful remark from the engine-room "_Machina qizdi_," "The machine has lost its temper"; and a halt that may last some hours, or may endure for a day. As for the islands, they are uninhabited by man. How the second got its name we know not; but "Sheep Island" has some herds of wild sheep, which have been long enough isolated to develop some characteristic peculiarities in their very fine horns.
Urmi is one of the most ancient centres of Christianity in the land; for if local tradition is to be trusted, the Faith was brought here by no less a person than one of the "Wise Men," who came from the East to the manger at Bethlehem. Oriental story, naturally, has nothing to say to their traditional migration to the city of Cologne; though it does include the three traditional names, Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar, as those of three of the band of twelve "Magi" who journeyed together to Palestine, looking for the fulfilment of the prophecy of that ancient initiate of their religion, Balaam the son of Beor. As for the identity of the Magian who came back to his home at Urmi, and brought the "Good News" with him; do not his revered bones rest to this day in the church of St. Mary in the city, and is not that proof enough? Like many another Oriental legend, it is at least more ancient, and less improbable, than is the story of the "Three Kings" of the city on the Rhine.