CH. VII THROUGH DESOLATED ARMENIA 63
in all respects exceptional, especially the three piebalds which drew my drosky and made nothing of the journey to Emerakom. When our three teams of three horses and three vehicles came stamping and rumbling over the hard road, the turnout must have made a very fine and festive show. I photographed the whole party on at least a dozen plates, but, alas, this very dozen were afterwards spoiled by the jolting to which all the baggage was subjected during a wild drive in Persia. A cinematographic film was more fortunate.
After breaking the day's journey by a rest at Hassan-kale we drove on eastwards over a stretch of road so bad and so lumbered up with irritating cobble-stones that we could drive only at a slow pace. Here and there we passed through small lakes of flood water. Farther on the road improved and became occasionally excellent. At
t; some distance to the right ran the Kale-su in its broad
shallow bed. Villages, farms, and human beings there were none, except some grazing flocks of sheep with their shepherds ; the country seems desolate and deserted, and yet ploughed fields lie everywhere in the valleys.
At length we come to the village Köpri-köi, with its lonely burial-ground. Just at the point where the Kale-su unites with the Bingör to form the Aras or Araxes, which for a long distance marks the boundary between Persia and the Caucasus and falls into the Caspian Sea at Kizil-aghach bay, the road passes over an old monumental bridge with six pointed Persian arches and resting on five columns. A slope runs from the bridge-head up to the middle, for the bridge is high and imposing, constructed of red stone and quite uninjured. It is a real work of art of its kind, a relic of a more fortunate or at least wealthier time in this country now so poor, where wretched mud houses and cabins are all that the art of building can attain to. But it
t may also be ascribed to the time of Theodosius, and when
one stands on its topmost arch and sees the united stream wind towards the north-east, soon to force its way into the Caucasus, one can imagine what a grand spectacle the turbid waters must present when the snow is melting in
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