four quarters bear the sling that killed Goliath, the harp of the Psalmist, the scales of Solomon, and the Lion of Judah; in pretence is an escutcheon with our Lord's tunic, encompassed by the inscription: Now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout.' The motto is taken from Psalm cxxxii: The Lord hath sworn in truth unto David; he will not turn from it; Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy seat.' From the lofty and narrow apse a fresco of the Saviour, reminiscent in its dignity of the Christ in the apse of Monreale, looks down with Byzantine austerity upon the dust of these princes whose descendants are still numerous in the land, links with a past of which most other living traces have long since ceased to be.

Not far from the cathedral is the ancient walled nunnery of Samtavr, with two frescoed churches, a delightful isolated belfry, and the cell of St Nino, a holy woman of Cappadocia, who brought Christianity to the Georgians. An aged Georgian princess presides over this venerable but impoverished foundation, next to the cathedral the most interesting object in Mtzkhet, and one of the best specimens of medieval Georgian architecture extant. In the graveyard beside the principal church I once took tea with the abbess, tea consisting of pieces of fillet of beef spitted and roasted in the open behind the apse, capsicums, pickled cucumbers, cheese, eggs, and wine. On the other side of the Aragwa, topping a high conical hill overlooking the town, is a fortified monastery called Mtziri, where St Nino is said to have watched the pagan rites of the people of Mtzkhet and to have prayed for their conversion. Mtziri is still inhabited by a single monk, who comes into Mtzkhet once a week to buy his scanty provisions. Numerous other monasteries and churches, castles and palaces, wholly or partially in ruins, are scattered along the banks of the Kura and Aragwa, silent witnesses to the past greatness of the ancient city of Mtzkhet.

A notable contribution to the medley of contrasts comes, too, from the region which has been known since 1918 as the Republic of Azerbaijan. The name which this State has assumed to itself is in truth somewhat of a misnomer, and is ever causing confusion with the older Azerbaijan, to wit, the north-western province of Persia,

whose capital is Tabriz. Less misleading names would have been the Republic of Baku, or that of Tatary, for BAKU is its capital, and its predominating and ruling race is Tatar. The Tatars of the Caucasus are a branch of the Turkish race and akin to the Tatars who inhabit the Crimea, Kazan, the Volga region of Russia, and Persian Azerbaijan; they speak a dialect of the Turkish language; and, apart from a veneer of Russians in the cities and along the railways and main roads, the sporadic colonies of Persians, Armenians, and other races inevitable in Transcaucasia, and a sprinkling of Sarts and Kirghiz from Turkestan, compose the population of this latest recruit to the number of Moslem States.

Except for the walls of its former citadel, some portions of the palace of the Shahs of Shirvan, and a massive tower known as Qiz Qulè, the Maiden's Keep,' Baku is wholly modern, yet lacks the finish and orderliness of modern Tiflis. It is a town of crude and as yet undigested wealth, similar in this respect to some of the large cities of the American Far and Middle West. Thus you will see a handsome public building or sumptuous immeuble side by side with a miserable shanty, or flanked by sites as yet unbuilt on; the mixture of styles recalls Fifth Avenue, the variety in the heights of the houses suggests Lower Broadway. All this is but natural in a place of rapid growth due to immense and recently developed riches; what is more likely to surprise strangers, especially those who look upon the Turkish race as one inept in business and of energies purely destructive, is the extent to which those riches have been acquired and held by Tatars. Tatar millionaires are as abundant in Baku as are American millionaires in Chicago; they do business on a large scale, own oil-wells and refineries, build and inhabit houses costly and luxurious, albeit of taste that is sometimes doubtful. The richer Tatar women are well educated, and get their clothes from, sometimes in, Paris; Tatar lady-doctors practise medicine with success and visit their patients in expensive motor-cars.

The average output of oil from the Baku area prior to March 1918, amounted to over 500,000 tons monthly; and in normal times a large fleet of sea-going tankers conveys the oil-fuel from Baku's excellent harbour to

Astrakhan, whence it is sent up the Volga in motorbarges for distribution through central Russia, its principal consumer. The oil-fuel is known as mazut, and is a thick dark brown substance-the residue which is left after the kerosene and other products have been obtained by refining the natural petroleum. The kerosene, on the other hand, finds a market in the West; and much of it is pumped across Transcaucasia to Batum through a pipe-line running parallel with the railway for more than 560 miles, a notable piece of engineering. The two main oil-fields of the Baku area are Surakhani and Balakhani, and in the latter is the Temple of Eternal Fire. But there are no eternal fires here now, as the deeper borings have eliminated the surface natural gas. This ancient shrine of the Zoroastrians is not easy to find nowadays, for it is concealed in the compound of one of the large companies, surrounded and overshadowed by modern machinery. Its vestal flame quenched, its scanty trickle of pilgrims from Persia dried up, this little temple is now a forlorn and pathetic object, an extinct fane of an all but extinct faith. Until recent years a solitary priest was maintained in it by the Parsee community of Bombay, but he, too, has now gone; and the very existence of this once famous place of worship is all but forgotten by the people of Baku.

As Karthlos, the great-great-grandson of Noah, is the legendary ancestor of the Karthlians or Georgians, so is his brother Haik the eponymous hero of the people whom we call Armenians. Haik is the name which the Armenians apply to themselves; Hayastan, the land of Haik, the term by which they denote their country. An Aryan people, the Armenians established themselves about the seventh century B.C. upon the remains of the ancient pre-Armenian kingdom of Van, and in part, no doubt, assimilated the civilisation of its people, who called themselves Khaldians, and have left inscriptions written in Assyrian cuneiform. They emerge into the clearer light of history under the Arsacids, a dynasty of Parthian origin, of whom a branch subsequently reigned for a while in Georgia. The Arsacids in earlier days ruled directly or as suzerains over a considerable Armenian population; but their frontiers had ever a tendency to fluctuate. Thus, in the days of Our Lord, an Arsacid,

Abgar V, was king of Edessa, the modern Urfa, in northern Mesopotamia; and the Armenian historian, Moses of Khorene, relates in detail the legend which has preserved the name of this Armenian kinglet from oblivion. King Abgar suffered from an incurable disease and sent a messenger to Jerusalem with a letter addressed to 'Jesus the good Physician,' inviting Him to come to Edessa and to heal him. Our Lord replied that He could not come, but that, after His ministry was accomplished, He would send disciples to cure the king and to teach Christianity to his people. The scribe who brought back the Saviour's reply painted a portrait of Our Lord 'in choice colours'; and this portrait, in the later developments of the story, becomes identified with St Veronica's veil. After the Ascension, Saints Thaddeus and Bartholomew came to Edessa in fulfilment of Our Lord's promise, restored Abgar to health, and preached the Gospel to the Edessenes.

Although modern criticism is inclined to reject the authenticity of the story of the portrait, there is ample evidence to prove that the Christian faith was brought to parts of Armenia at the very dawn of Christianity, even if not at the hands of Bartholomew and Thaddeus. For some time, however, it made only partial progress; and in the latter half of the third century the Armenian king Tiridates (Dirdat) II, son of Chosroes, was sacrificing at his capital of Vagharshabad to Anahid, the mother-goddess, and Astghik, the goddess of love, to Aramazd, father of the gods, and his daughter Nanea, to Vahagn, Mithra, and Barshamin. There then arrived, so says the legend, on the banks of the Araxes a nun of surpassing beauty named Rhipsimé, fleeing from her Roman convent to escape the attentions of the Emperor Diocletian. With her were Gaiané, the abbess of the convent, and numerous other nuns. Meanwhile the infatuated Emperor had sent messengers in all directions in search of the lady; and in due course an envoy arrived at the Armenian court. He bore a missive from Diocletian begging the king to lay hands on Rhipsimé and her companions, to put the latter to death, but to return the beauteous virgin to Rome, unless he himself should be overcome by her charms, in which case he was authorised to keep her for himself.

Tiridates lost little time in tracking out the party, and, indeed, in falling a victim to the beauty of the Roman nun. He offered to make her his queen, but Rhipsimé, who had refused the hand of the Roman Emperor because he was a pagan, was equally proof against the entreaties of the heathen Armenian king. Tiridates then put the nun and her companions to death with hideous tortures, only to be visited with the immediate wrath of the Almighty. According to the legend, he was changed into a wild boar, and was only restored to human form through the intercession of his cousin Gregory, the 'Illuminator,' whom fourteen years previously he had consigned to the bottom of a dry well for having endeavoured to make him a Christian. Gregory was brought from Artaxata, the place of his confinement, to Vagharshabad, where he converted the king and his nobles, Tiridates accepting, in the words of Sir Charles Eliot, in a literal sense the proverb respecting the position of truth.' Gregory now beheld his famous vision of the Saviour descending in a flood of light and striking the earth with a golden mallet. As the mallet touched the ground there arose from it one great and three small pedestals of gold, surmounted by crosses of fire. The great pedestal was placed near the king's palace, the smaller ones over the spots where Rhipsimé and Gaiané had been put to death, and over a cellar where the nuns had previously taken refuge. Gregory ordered chapels to be built over the three lesser sites, while on the greater one he erected the cathedral, which received the name of Echmiadzin, meaning 'the Only-begotten descended.'

Vagharshabad is situated thirteen miles west of Erivan, in the plain of the Araxes, and is reached by a high-road fringed with poplars and bordered by what were once vineyards, orchards, and kitchen gardens. At the outskirts of the village-for such has become the capital of Tiridates-stands the Church of St Rhipsimé, a building of noble simplicity and one of the best surviving examples of early Armenian architecture. It dates, probably, from the beginning of the seventh century, and was, when I last saw it, in September 1920, in perfect preservation. We traverse the single street of Vagharshabad, and arrive at the outbuildings of ECHMIADZIN,