Jelaleddin
A Picture of His Invasion
[From the Armenian of Raffi]
IV.
Scarcely had Venus risen in the morning sky, and the blushing dawn begun to purple the eastern horizon, when the young man awoke. He shuddered from head to foot when he realized that he had wasted all the latter half of the night, during which he might have performed so much of his journey. He hastily took up his gun and lance, and set out.
As he passed the highlands of Aghpag he saw Armenian villages from which smoke was still rising through the morning mist. This was not the smoke that rises in the morning from the chimney of the peaceful peasant's cottage; it was an ominous smoke, which was sometimes mingled with creeping flames. He passed close by one village and saw that all the little cottages were in ashes, and here and there lay bodies covered with blood and horribly mutilated. He felt all the horrors of the events of the past night, which had been inexplicable to him. The fires in the dark, which had so terrified him, were the Armenian villages burning.
All these sickening pictures seemed ordinary things to him; as if he had known that all this had to be,—as if, like a prophet of evil, he had foreseen the future in all its bloody colors, and, having previously read his long lamentations Jeremiah-like, his heart was now hardened, and no tears were left in his eyes to shed over the present miseries. He looked unmoved upon the ruins, upon those heaps of dead bodies, where men, women, girls, babes, aged and young, lay one upon the other.
