Garni Gorge, an hour east of Yerevan in Armenia, is walled with thousands of basalt columns that hang over the river like the pipes of an organ. Armenians call the wall the Symphony of Stones. No mason had anything to do with it. A thick lava flow cooled slowly here and split as it shrank into five- and six-sided prisms. They did not settle upright: the ranks lean out over the gorge, and in places they bend and fan across the face of the cliff. The way down is a rough track off the rim, loose rock and steep switchbacks, and the climb back out takes noticeably longer than the way down took you. From the floor the pillars go up out of sight above you, and the stone is close enough to put a hand on. The path then follows the Azat between boulders and shaded pools. Snowmelt off the Geghama mountains brings the river up from April into June, when it roars past the foot of the columns. In autumn the oak slopes turn gold and the low sun picks out every ridge of the flutes.
Down on the floor an eleventh-century single-arched bridge still takes you across the Azat. It was repaired in 2012, and Armenian conservationists have argued about it since. The medieval builders used rough, unworked stone; the rebuild used neat dressed blocks, and added a parapet to a bridge that never had one and was only ever meant for people on foot. The other colonnade stands on the promontory above. The Temple of Garni was raised in the first century AD for Mihr, the Armenian sun god, and is the only Greco-Roman colonnaded temple left standing in the former Soviet Union. Beyond it the dry grassland of the Kotayk plateau rolls away, and on a clear day you pick out Ararat on the south-western horizon. An earthquake brought the temple down in 1679, and in the 1970s it was pieced back together from its own fallen blocks. Nothing has ever had to be done for the columns beneath it.