He looked and passed on. During his journey he often met with whole villages burned to ashes.
The dawn grew brighter and the rays of the yet unrisen. sun threw brilliant reflections upon the white clouds, turning them rosy. But there was no light yet in the depths of the valleys. The young man continued his journey through bypaths. It seemed as if only the mountain goat could have passed those terrible ascents and descents, those narrow defiles and rocky steeps, which lay along his way. He was directing his course towards the village of Yerevan. At last he reached it. Fire and sword had consumed man and dwelling. He wandered a long time among the bodies lying on the ground, as if in search of something. At last he stopped in front of the smouldering ruins of a large cottage and gazed at it in deep silence. In that cottage his childhood had been passed; there lived his parents, his brothers and sisters, who were now no more!
A few tears flowed down his pale face.
The tear is a marvellous expression of the passions of the soul. Joy has tears as well as sorrows. But terrible are the tears of indignation. Such tears are like those of heaven, which are mingled with thunder and lightning.
He noticed beside the burning cottage a few household articles piled up together, which the plunderers had probably been unable to carry away. All of them were familiar to him. On that beautiful rug his aged father often sat; under that embroidered bedspread he used to sleep when a boy; in that large basin his mother set the bread to raise; there was the old bowl into which his sister milked the ewes.
He took them one by one and threw them into the fire of the burning cottage.
At that moment two well-armed Kurdish horsemen burst upon the scene, bringing with them several led horses.
"Why are you burning these things?" said one of them. "We have come to fetch them. We had no horses then to carry them away."
"You will take them now," said the young man coldly. "Alight."
