and looted, its roads unmended, its squares dense with refugees, Erivan is the saddest town I have ever seen. One feels that its two sentinels have been false to their trust; that Alagyöz to the north, to the south the Mountain of the Ark rising solitary from the plain, have failed to protect the city committed to their charge. Its population is Armenian, Tatar, and Persian ; and, although it has lost much of its Eastern character in ninety years of Russian rule and expansion, a few monuments still serve to recall the memory of its Persian masters. Foremost among these is the Gyök Jami', 'the Mosque of Heaven,' so called from the tiles of its dome, around which the name of 'Ali is inlaid in yellow and black on a ground of turquoise blue. The mosque is of the usual Shiah type, a great court with rooms for scholars surrounding a basin of noble proportions. There is much beautiful brick-work about the place; and the taller of the two minarets is tastefully decorated with polychrome tiles. The lesser one, which is more generally used by the muezzin, is topped, somewhat incongruously, by an iron umbrella! At the other end of the town, behind the mournful black offices of the Armenian Government, is a smaller but similar mosque, that of the 'Ali Khan family, a race of Tatar nobles who at one time were Sirdars of Erivan under the Shahs. Their rambling and decaying but still beautiful palace adjoins the mosque, but had been let by the present 'Ali Khan Erivanski, when I was last there, as a home for refugee orphans.

The most famous or, perhaps, infamous Sirdar of Erivan was the Sirdar Hasan Khan, he whom Morier depicts so vividly in 'Hajji Baba' as a cruel and abandoned debauchee, yet liberal and enterprising hospitable to his boon companions, the boldest drinker of wine in the Shah's dominions. In the all but vanished citadel above the cliffs of the Zanga, where the river makes a sweeping bend in its rapid course towards the Araxes, would sit the Sirdar Hasan, surveying from his lavishly decorated pavilion the double-arched bridge which connects the city with the country beyond. Here, when his playful fancy seized him, he would shoot at the donkeys of the luckless peasants as they wound into the town; while from the latticed windows of a

neighbouring apartment the inmates of his well-stocked anderun enjoyed the view of his garden across the river. These windows, now no more, were actually the scene of one of the most touching stories which Morier puts in the mouth of his immortal Ispahani. In the course of one of his marauding attacks on the Armenian villages of the neighbourhood, Hasan Khan abducted a beautiful Armenian maiden on her wedding-night from the arms of her lover, and removed her to his seraglio. Yusuf, the distraught bridegroom, suspecting whither his bride had been taken, made his way to the town, and for more than two weeks kept watch on the bridge in the hope of catching a glimpse of his Mariam. At length his patience was rewarded, more dramatically than he could have foreseen. Suddenly, one day, the lattice was opened, and Mariam appeared at the window and precipitated herself from it towards her lover. A willow growing below the window broke the fall of the intrepid maiden; and Yusuf was able to carry her away, bruised but living. Their freedom, however, was of short duration; the pair were soon captured and brought to the Sirdar.

Here Persian romance gives Hasan Khan the credit for a beau geste, which I fear he is not likely to have deserved. Touched by the devotion of the lovers, he allows Yusuf and Mariam to go in peace; 'hearts so closely united,' he is made to say, 'let no man endeavour to part.' It seems a pity to cast doubts on so generous a speech, yet I feel that Morier's ending to the story is more probably the true one. Yusuf renders the Sirdar a service in his operations against the Russians, is pardoned, and restored to this wife with the words, 'Go, and recollect that my condescension towards you depends on your future conduct.' He seems to have appraised these words at their true worth, for when, soon afterwards, he and Mariam contrived to escape, the Sirdar's fury knew no bounds. He sent a party of men to burn Yusuf's village and to bring his family as prisoners before him. Luckily the youth had lost no time in migrating with all his relatives into Russian territory, thus foiling the cruelty of the ferocious voluptuary. It is difficult to feel much pity for Hasan Khan in his wretched end. He died in a miserable stable, his only possession the rags which covered his aged body. In

like manner does a crumbling wall of mud now clothe the corpse of the luxurious palace, where he loved and made merry in the days of his greatness.

One other town can claim to have had a place for a time among the capitals of Transcaucasia. Under the terms of the armistice with Turkey the district of Batum passed into Allied occupation; and for close on two years the town of BATUM was the capital of a province under British military administration, governed by a BrigadierGeneral and his staff, and rejoicing in postage stamps of its own. On July 7, 1920, in accordance with a decision of the San Remo Conference, town and province were transferred to Georgia; and Batum reverted from capital to its previous status. Truth to tell, it is not a very interesting place. Quite a small town when the Russians obtained it from the Turks in 1878, it has been entirely rebuilt by them, and consequently contains nothing old or remarkable. Many charming villas, however - now mostly deserted-dot its surroundings, for the Russians developed the place not only as a port, but as a winter resort. And a delightful winter resort it must have been before the war, for the climate and bathing are good, and the scenery magnificent, the mountains rising in a semi-circle almost sheer from the sea, densely covered with verdure of every kind. Batum has one of the heaviest rainfalls of the world; and its vegetation is almost tropical. The railway to Tiflis runs for some distance after leaving Batum through thick forest of magnolia and blue hydrangea; and at Chakwa, fifteen miles from Batum, is a flourishing tea and bamboo plantation that belonged to the Russian Imperial House. The population of town and district is curiously mixed. It includes Ajars, the Moslem Georgians after whom this region is sometimes called Ajaristan, and numbers of their kinsmen, the Lazes, from over the Turkish border. Then there are Christian Georgians, Russians, Turks, Pontine Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and a few Persians; while scattered about the neighbourhood are colonies of Yezidis from Kurdistan, a harmless and gentle people who worship the devil in the guise of the sacred peacock, Melek Tawus.

Thus even this modern port, solely preoccupied with

to

trade, contributes to that extraordinary diversity which makes Transcaucasia one of the most interesting, most surprising, most baffling regions of the globe. Transcaucasia is not the Moslem East; it is not the Byzantine or Slavonic East; it is not the Latin East, where Moslem architecture is grafted so happily on to Gothic in the lands of the Crusades. It represents something far older and wilder, something thrown up by the clash not of an ancient Asia and a modern Europe, but of an ancient Asia and an equally ancient Europe. It is a meeting-ground of faiths among which Christianity and Islam are very young indeed, a place where men pray God, the devil, the Imam 'Ali, the sun, Queen Tamara, or pray not at all; where an officer may have been an Imperial page at the Court of Petrograd, and worship at an altar of goats' horns; where people regard Noah and David as intimate and not too remote relations; where a man will dress in chain mail, and be a follower of Karl Marx; where a peasant is often a prince; where Tatar ladies spend busy mornings driving their motor-cars from clinic to clinic; where shadowy Völkerwanderungen have left their trace in fragments of races, through whom there whispers faintly the voice of a past long since forgotten; where massacres and coups d'état are on a scale and of a frequency and intensity that reduce the worst excesses of the Balkans to childish, nay, babyish proportions; where men are of Homeric stature and appetites, women of Amazonian courage; where mythology and paganism are still alive-in short, where the common contrasts of West and East, of town and country, plain and mountain, Christianity and Islam, cut across another series of contrasts that recall the days when the world was in its youth, and Prometheus was battling with the gods to secure their wisdom for man. Not wrongly was the Caucasus held in awe as the home of strange and fabulous beings, the mysterious scene of marvels, shrouded in Cimmerian gloom at the end of the known world; things as wonderful as those which amazed the ancients and enthralled the hearers of the Arabian Nights still happen in the lands and cities about Mount Qaf.

H. C. LUKE.

Art. 5.-EDUCATION AND RESEARCH IN AGRICUL

TURE.

Of all the promises made to this country's 'greatest national industry,' only one has been redeemed. Corn production is now left to chance; control of farmer's acts of husbandry has been abandoned; the agricultural labourer is given over to the play of the market and to voluntary committees whose decisions can only become binding by common consent. The soil of England has changed hands. The landlords, who through many years were the pioneers of all agricultural development and improvement, have yielded place either to wealthy townsmen without traditions or to the old-time tenantfarmers who, as a result of a few good years, bought their holdings and in many instances are already regretting the purchase. Corn production is declining; the arable area has been reduced by over 400,000 acres in twelve months. The long hot summer of 1921 must have proved of great value to the bare fallows, of which England and Wales carried some half-million acres; and the state of the land may have tempted farmers to a further effort, but the market outlook is not favourable. The worldacreage of cereals is growing, and the returns are high and likely to increase this year, so that home produce will tend to decline in price, though by the time the miller, the baker, the cattle-dealer and the butcher, the market-man and the greengrocer, the combines and the milkman have worked their will, the consumer will be required to pay a high figure for all farm produce. It may well be that the cultivator of a mixed farm, making a normal return of corn, beef, milk, and vegetables, will find himself compelled to compound with creditors, or close down, while the ultimate price of his produce has enabled middlemen to make a good living at his expense. Co-operation might save him; but co-operation demands a certain standard of education, the standard that will enable a man to understand the movements of markets, the organisation of labour, the causes of fluctuating prices, the various stages that separate the wheat in the sack and the bullock in the meadow from the loaf and the joint of beef on the consumer's table.