Go*Dutch! New Dutch Writing

The first time I saw Mount Ararat with my own eyes, I was not prepared. It was November 1999, in the days when the millennium bug was on everyone’s lips. On Times Square, but also - closer to home - on Moscow’s Red Square, you could watch the seconds tick by on bright digital screens. The great countdown had begun, the things one did were done a bit more hastily, but also more intensely. Who could guarantee that, at 00.00 hours on 1 January, 2000, a barrage of Russian nuclear missiles would not rise from their silos along with the fireworks? You could remain stoic in the face of it, you could poke fun at it, you could see it as Armageddon in the offing.

It was during those days that I travelled to Armenia. I was working as a newspaper correspondent in the former Soviet Union, but had never visited the southern boundaries of my beat.

Upon arrival that time in Yerevan, there was something I overlooked: the tube between aircraft door and airport complex sucks the unsuspecting visitor into the heart of a volcano. The architect had designed the terminal in the shape of a flattened cone, with the control tower rising out of its crater like a jet of lava.

Having collected my bags, I hopped aboard a shuttle bus that was idling in its own exhaust beneath a concrete viaduct. As we headed into town, I was struck by the realization that the flat countryside with its distant vines and poplars was shielded off by a cordon of rock. It was not a wall, more a climbing wattle of layers green and grey. I had to crane my neck to see whether that pile of boulders and grass ever stopped, and leaning over a little further I saw at last a black ribbon of rock capped by a veil of ice. Only above that came the blue of the sky. It was as though Ararat had seen me before I saw her.

In Yerevan one never escapes Ararat’s gaze. What I felt like most was sitting down at a sidewalk café and staring back. ‘Masis’ the Armenians called her, or ‘The Mother Mountain’ - with on her flank a perfect volcanic cone that had once sprung from her womb amid thundering contractions. I tried to go about my business, but was distracted by the backdrop of that two-headed mountain. Pounding in my head was the sentence my Russian teacher had once made me recite like a mantra, in order to practice the rolling ‘r’.

Na gore Ararat
rashtot
krupny vinograd

(On Ararat there grows an enormous vineyard)

I caught myself taking pleasure in saying aloud the word ‘Ararat’ (which would not allow itself to be whispered). The two r’s you could let roll like an avalanche of stone on a distant slope.

Daily life in the city went on as usual: street merchants displayed their wares - cut flowers, newspapers, puzzle books. But what I noticed most was how the day, as it wore on, grew increasingly hazy, making the lower slopes of Ararat look as though they had been drenched in lakes of milk. In the afternoon a collar of cloud arose around the level of black rock, but the gleaming whiteness of the summit still stuck out above.

Even if you stayed inside, there was no getting around Ararat. Her likeness was on banknotes, postage stamps and printed as a hologram on credit cards. Even when I wasn’t paying attention, she popped up in all kinds of surprising forms.

It started with the Yerevan Cognac Distillery, a granite fortress built in the Empire style of which Stalin was so fond. ‘Ararat’ was the name of the cognac liqueur produced and bottled here. On the wall of the cellar where the cognac lay aging, the writer Gorky had once scratched out a maxim of his own:

comrades, respect the power of armenian cognac! it is easier to climb unto heaven than to scramble up out of here once you have imbibed too much.

The elderly Armenian in the three-piece suit who showed me around was named Eduard. He ran his hand over the oaken barrels and talked about the Ararat grape, which grows only at the foot of the mountain.

‘You read the Bible?’ The question sounded more like an assignment, or a recommendation at the very least, and he added self-assuredly: ‘The vines from which our grapes come grow in the vineyard that Noah planted here himself.’

And so it went, again and again. With a photographer I took a taxi to the National Salt Works, a mining operation where even the company buildings at ground level were on the verge of collapse. After the excavations stopped, an asthma clinic was set up in one of the shafts.

In what was once the miners’ dressing room we were fitted out with helmets and hung with lab coats. Anoush, a paediatrician with the looks of a stewardess, ran through the safety instructions. She tossed her flashlight from one hand to the other, and arched her plucked eyebrows: only when all was in readiness were we allowed to descend into her hospital. We climbed into an elevator cage, the grillwork door closed, and we sank wobblingly into the earth. Anoush laughed and clicked on her flashlight. ‘If the electricity goes out, we’ll need this.’ Playing with the beam of light, she drew waves on the passing strata. I recognized boulder clay, limestone formations and then, quite suddenly, salt.

At 234 meters beneath the surface, the cage stopped. A red neon cross hung above the door that opened onto a corridor hacked out of solid salt crystal. Behind plastic curtains hanging from their metal rods were children with moist black eyes who could barely breathe in the normal air outside. Then, Dr. Anoush said: ‘The layer of salt in which we find ourselves precipitated immediately after the Deluge, when the waters receded.’

Perhaps this was all nonsense, but the salt bore witness in any event to the fact that the plains at Ararat’s feet had been a sea that had once evaporated like a pan of soup. The only question was: how many millions of years had gone by since this crust was formed?

The Armenians I spoke to weren’t interested in what carbon- 14 or potassium-argon dating had to say. For them, only one thing mattered: they were living in the land of Noah, the place where the first rainbow had appeared in the sky. In accordance with the letter of the Bible, they believed in an Ark that had been three hundred cubits long, fifty wide and thirty high, a lifeboat caulked with pitch in which man and animal had survived the flooding of the whole Earth. They could point out to a spot of shadow on Ararat’s northern flank, where Noah had found the stone that served as the altar on which he sacrificed ‘of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl’. Looking up at the omnipresent Masis, the Armenians saw the focal point not only of their own world, but of the universe.

And were they ever religious - despite (or perhaps due to) the ‘scientific atheism’ to which they’d paid lip service during seventy years of Soviet rule.

Long-forgotten illustrations from my children’s Bible came back to me there in Armenia. I saw bearded Noah kneeling beside his altar to pray. The rainbow, the sign of God’s covenant with mankind. I saw the dove with the olive branch in its beak. The animals swarming out of the Ark, two by two, with orders to be ‘fruitful and multiply’ upon the face of the earth.

Of course I didn’t really believe that the Ark had run aground up yonder - to me, the story of Noah’s Ark was a story, first and foremost - but the fact that you could say ‘up yonder’ and point to it with your finger did not leave me cold. I had never paused to consider the fact that there were Biblical locations one could actually visit: the myth of the Ark was anchored in the rock-bottom reality of a real mountain. One with a name, an altitude (5,165 meters) that could be measured precisely, and with coordinates (39o 42’ north latitude, 44o17’ eastern longitude) indisputable by human standards.