Ararat 1

Abstract

IN the childhood of mankind the dwellers in Western Asia cherished the story of a great flood which drowned all their race save one man and his family. They told the tale from father to son, how the flood rose till it covered their highest hills, and how the ark in which their ancestor had saved himself, his family, and a motley crowd of animals floated on the waters until, when these abated, it came to rest on the first emerging summit of the land. They chose as the scene of this new starting-point for humanity the loftiest peak of which they had knowledge—a vast snowy cone shooting far into the blue air above, and shrouding itself every day in cloud and storm. No one had ever climbed to its mysterious summit since the ark rested there. But generation after generation looked up to it with awe and veneration from the plains of Armenia. The story spread far away into other lands. It became part of the religious teaching of nearly a half of mankind. No mountain is so familiar, all the world over, as that from which Noah is famed to have descended to re-people the earth. The first conception which, as children, most of us have formed of a mountain, arose out of this story of Ararat.