is the most elevated.[44] “Its basin,” to quote Dean Stanley’s graphic description, “is a steaming caldron—a bowl which, from the peculiar temperature and deep cavity in which it is situated, can never be filled to overflowing. The river Jordan, itself exposed to the same withering influences, is not copious enough to furnish a supply equal to the demand made by the rapid evaporation. Its excessive saltness is even more remarkable than its deep depression. This peculiarity is, it is believed, mainly occasioned by the huge barrier of fossil-salt at its south-west corner, and heightened by the rapid evaporation of the fresh water poured into it. Other like phenomena, though in a less striking form, exist elsewhere. But, without entering into its wider relations, this aspect is important, as that which most forcibly impressed the sacred writers. To them it was ‘the salt sea,’ and nothing more. They exhibit hardly a trace of the exaggerations of later times. And so it is in fact. It is not gloom, but desolation, which is the prevailing characteristic of the Sea of Death. Follow the course of the Jordan to its end. How different from the first burst of its waters in Mount Hermon, amongst the groves of Dan and Paneas! How different from the ‘riotous prodigality of life’ which has marked its downward course, almost to the very termination of its existence! Gradually, within the last mile from the Dead Sea, its verdure dies away, and the river melts into its grave in a tame and sluggish stream; still, however, of sufficient force to carry its brown waters far into the bright green sea. Along the desert shore the white crust of salt indicates the cause of sterility. Thus the few living creatures which the Jordan washes down into the waters of the sea are destroyed. Hence arises the unnatural buoyancy and the intolerable nausea to taste and touch, which raise to the highest pitch the contrast between its clear, bitter waves, and the soft, fresh, turbid stream of its parent river. Strewn along its desolate margin lie the most striking memorials of this last conflict of life and death: trunks and branches of trees, torn down from the thickets of the river-jungle by the violence of the Jordan, thrust out into the sea, and thrown up again by its waves, dead and barren as itself. The dead beach shelves gradually into the calm waters. A deep haze—that which to earlier ages gave the appearance of the ‘smoke going up for ever and ever’—veils its southern extremity, and almost gives it the dim horizon of a real sea. In the nearer view rises the low island close to its northern end, and the long promontory projecting from the eastern side, which divides it into its two unequal parts. This is all that I saw, and all that most pilgrims and travellers have seen, of the Dead Sea.”[45]
The sinister aspect of the valley of the Jordan, especially at the embouchure of the river, impresses itself on the mind of every spectator. There the traveller finds the path narrowed between two abrupt gigantic walls. On the right rises the Arabian chain, black and perpendicular; on the left, the Judæan range, less elevated, more irregular, and resembling a dismantled ruin. “The valley comprised between these two chains,” says the Père Laorty-Hadji, “exhibits a soil closely resembling the bed of a sea which has long been dry. You can discern but a few stunted trees. Ruined towns and castles appear in the distance. At the moment of flinging itself into the Dead Sea, the Jordan itself, traversing a muddy soil, changes its physiognomy and colour. It seems to drag reluctantly, towards the motionless lake, a burden of slow and tawny waters. The shores of the Dead Sea are low on the east and west; to the north and south high mountains enclose it.” “These mountains, separated by a formidable cleft, exhibit their beds of red sandstone, overlain by a thick stratum of compact chalk, interrupted by silicious fragments. One is surprised not to see a volcanic crater, when all about, in this convulsed site, the action of fire is visible—the violent, bitter struggle of the two Neptunian and Plutonian principles, which, during the geological eras, contended for the empire of the world. One might say that here the two antagonistic forces exhausted themselves, that they have equally lost their potency; so much so, that at the close of the combat all has sunk into the silence and immobility of death. And who knows if the volcanic crater, whose absence at first astonishes the observer, is not the Dead Sea itself? Is it unreasonable to admit that after the upheaval of the mountains which inclose it, and which a terrible explosion of subterranean fire will have separated, the neighbouring waters were precipitated into and swallowed up in the yawning gulf which they still fill to-day?... This hypothesis is so much the more probable, because in this fire-scathed region the lake affords manifest indications of an igneous travail even now accomplishing itself sullenly in the bowels of the globe. We know that its name of Lake Asphaltites is due to the semi-fluid bituminous matter which constantly rises to its surface and accumulates on its shores. With the vapours exhaled by this bitumen under the influence of heat, mingle sulphurous and ammoniacal exhalations, which render the atmosphere of the Dead Sea dangerous to breathe.”[46]
Before 1835 no one had ventured upon its waters. An Irish traveller, named Cottingham, was their first navigator; but after a five days’ voyage he returned to Jerusalem, and died of exhaustion. Two years later Messrs. Moore and Beke made a new attempt. For several days they withstood the pestilential exhalations of the lake, and succeeded in proving the deep depression of its basin; but at length, both of them being taken ill, they were compelled to cut short their explorations. In 1847 the enterprise was undertaken by a Frenchman—Lieutenant Molyneux—who sounded it in many places, but was speedily carried off by fever. The following year Lieutenant Lynch, of the American navy, embarked on the lake in iron boats, with competent crews. He navigated its waters for three weeks; but all who composed the expedition were more or less severely attacked, and one of them, Lieutenant Deane, succumbed.
Though, as we have said, geographical research has dissipated most of the wild stories formerly accepted in reference to the peculiarly fatal concomitants of the Dead Sea, it well deserves its expressive name. It is a dead sea: it has neither the ocean’s living movement nor deep-sounding roar; the surf and the spray never sparkle on its rocks; that “multitudinous laughter” which Homer ascribes to the sea is wholly wanting; the wind never wakes a smile on its passive and sombre countenance. By its shores one might realize Shelley’s mournful wish, and feel
“In the warm air
His cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o’er his dying brain its last monotony.”[47]
It is lifeless, untenanted; the fish found there, and brought down by the Jordan, are dead. Unlike the Caspian, it is never stirred by the whirr of wings—by the flight of gulls, or pelicans, or sea-mews. The migratory birds sweep across it without even a pause, without seeking the prey which they could not find. Its waters are denser than those of other seas: their constituents are different, and mingled in different proportions.