During his travels to Armenia, Soviet Russian writer Vasily Grossman observed Mount Ararat from Yerevan standing high in the blue sky. He wrote that with its gentle, tender contours, it seems to grow not out of the earth but out of the sky, as if it has condensed from its white clouds and its deep blue. It is this snowy mountain, this bluish-white sunlit mountain that shone in the eyes of those who wrote the Bible.