Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 19.pdf/546

 THE RT. HON. JAMES BRYCE the office of drawing more closely the bonds which unite the two great English speaking nations of the world. THE ASCENT OF ARARAT: A RELIC OF NOAH. Here is a concluding picture: the learned civilian, the busy barrister, the active mem ber of Parliament, mounted on a Caucasian steed with pistols stuck in his belt, snowspectacled and brandishing a heavy ice axe in the intervals a bridle and a big white umbrella. Before him the glittering peak of Ararat beginning like an eastern beauty to draw over its face the noonday veil of cloud. In the foreground, the first simple life of the world, a band of Kurds with their beautiful flocks, the exquisite colors of the women's dresses and ornaments, their own graceful figures, the clear pool, the rolling pasture. "Mounting steadily along the same ridge, I saw at a height of over thirteen thousand feet, lying on the loose blocks, a piece of wood about four feet long and five inches thick, evidently cut by some tool and so far above the limit of trees that it could by no possibility be a natural fragment of one. Darting on it with a glee that as tonished the Cossack and the Kurd, I

held it up to them, made them look at it and repeated several times, the word "Noah." The Cossack grinned, but he was such a cheery genial fellow that I think he would have grinned whatever I had said and I cannot be sure that he took my meaning and recognised the wood as a fragment of the true Ark. Whether it was really gopher wood, of which material the Ark was built, I will not undertake to say, but I am willing to submit to the inspection of the curious the bit which I cut off with my ice axe and brought away. Anyhow it will be hard to prove that it is not gopher wood. And if there be any remains of the Ark on Ararat at all — a point as to which the natives are perfectly clear — here rather than the top is the place where one might expect to find them. Since in the course of ages they would get carried down by the onward movement of the snow beds along the declivities. This wood, therefore, suits all the require ments of the case — in fact, the argument is, for the case of a relic, exceptionally strong; the Crusaders who found the holy lance at Antioch, the archbishop who recognized the holy coat at Treves, not to speak of many others, proceeded upon slighter evidence." London, England, August, 1907.