on a january day back in 1923
...Rose Wilder Lane wrote the following to her grandmother, Caroline Ingalls:

Mother writes that you were worried about my being in Constantinople when the Near East situation blew up, so I hasten to assure you myself that I am not to be worried about. Little things like wars and revolutions are commonplace to me now, and anyway, they are never as exciting when you are in them as they are when you read about them. I have been under fire so many times in Europe that I miss it when I don't hear rifle-fire or machine guns for a long time.

I was really very sorry not to have been in Constantinople when the excitement started, for I would have gone at once to Smyra or Thrace, where most of my lucky friends rushed to be. Instead I was marooned up here in the Causausas, with the Black Sea closed, and no way to get back except through Persia and Mesopotamia, and that is such a long and difficult way that I knew everything would be ended before I could get there. So I stayed looking at scenery, until I came down into Armenia, which is even more peaceful.

The sulphur baths were fun; they are about twelve hundred years old, or so. Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, was named for them in the sixth century. They are natural sulphur springs, volcanically heated, and the water is piped into large buildings all blue mosaic outside and steam inside. You go down stone stairs into underground rooms walled with tile and vaulted like cathedrals and while you sit in the steam an attendant scrapes off most of your skin with a bath-mitten, and then fills a soaped cotton sack with her breath, and squeezes it over you, and lo! you are simply buried in soap bubbles. There are showers both hot and cold, and huge pools of the hot sulphur water, in which you soak and play around. You have all this to yourself, a private room. All Tiflis goes to the sulphur baths and there are 47 different nationalities in Tiflis, so you can imagine what fun it is to watch them while you wait your turn for a room. There are Tartars and Georgians and Armenians and Russians and people from Daghestan and Ajerbaijan and Adcasia and all kinds of places whose very names I never heard before.

Armenia is a beautiful country, and in normal times it would be very rich agriculturally. Lots of beautiful valleys between mountains. Just now I am at Ervain, the capital, which is just under Ararat, where Noah's Ark is supposed to have rested after the flood. I doubt it, myself, for goodness knows he would have had a frightful time herding all the animals down about 15,000 feet of damp cliffs!

I am a guest of the Near East Relief which has certainly pulled Armenia through a hard time. Things are much better now; practically all the refugees have disappeared, absorbed into the country, and things are rapidly getting back to normal. The Near East Relief has 23,000 orphans in one station alone, Alexandropol. It is an astounding sight-they simply cover the ground for miles. They live in the old barracks of the Russian Czarist army, which were badly broken up during the wars, but which the Near East repaired. They have schools, hospitals, carpenter shops, blacksmith shops, several thousand acres of land which they cultivate and acres of dormitories and dining rooms; it is the largest orphanage in the world. There are several thousands more in other stations, about six thousand here in Erivan. The whole country was in such a wrecked condition that when the Near East Relief came that it had practically to build towns; it distributed food and clothes to the refugees and have them work for it, and thus it built roads and cleaned and paved streets and repaired buildings and sanitary systems and it is now helping the government build three irrigation systems by the same method. It is a very sensible way of distributing relief, I think, because it not only relieves an immediate condition, but leaves something of permanent value. Armenia is getting along very well, considering everything. The harvest is about 60 per cent of enough to feed the population until another harvest, because there was not enough seed to plant. The government distributed all the seed there was, and the Near East Relief distributed grits for the people to eat so that they would not have to eat the seed. That way, they got through last year. This year Russia is sending 200,000 pood (pood is about 36 pounds) of seed to help through this year, and I think that by next year there will be no need for adult relief. The Near East will then have only the orphans on its hands. In another four or five years I believe Armenia will be on its feet and well started as a rich agricultural country able to take care of itself.

I do not yet know exactly where I shall go from here. I want to go down through Persia to Bagdad and across to Palestine, if it is possible. On account of the recent war in Turkey, and the winter coming on, when the mountain passes are filled with snow, and camels cannot get through, this may be impossible. If it is, I shall have to go back through Georgia and across the Black Sea to Constantinople. And if I do that, I may take a side trip up to Moscow for a week or so. It seems a pity to miss anything, and yet this is a very large world to get around, and I do want to get home sometime! I had expected to be in San Francisco before this; just think, it is a year since I left Paris and I have only got so far as the Caucausas with the whole of Asia practically untouched yet.

Except for the malaria which I got in Albania, and a fearful cold that I got coming out of the sulphur baths on a cold day in Tiflis, I'm well and flourishing. However, my hair is quite gray, surely as gray as mother's. I don't know how you women of the last generations kept color in your hair for so long. Mine simply gave one look at Europe and turned white at the sight.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:59 AM