In the twelfth century the Crusaders fixed upon the Khureitûn Cave, with their usual hasty judgment, as being the Cave of Adullam, no doubt because it was the most remarkable place of the kind that they could find. The early Christians, however, had been better informed, and the true site, as will be seen later, is to be sought in the Valley of Elah, many miles west of Bethlehem; for Josephus tells us that the cave was at the city of Adullam, which was in the low hills west of the watershed mountains (Ant. vi. 12, 2), and this agrees with the use of the word “hold” or “fortress” in connection with the cave (1 Chron. xi. 16). David’s stronghold, moreover, was not in the “land of Judah” (1 Sam. xxii. 5), but on the border of the Philistine country.
Our first camp in the desert was fixed beside the Monastery of St. Saba, a famous settlement of Greek monks. We here entered into an entirely distinct region. The character of the rock was different from the stratified limestone of the mountains above; it is a white soft chalk, which is worn, by the winter rain, into long knife-edged ridges, separated by narrow ravines with stony beds. The sea breeze never visits this ghastly desert, which is fitly called in Scripture Jeshimon or “solitude.” Thus, though in spring the naked slopes are thinly covered with grass and flowers, it presents, throughout nearly the whole year, a long succession of glaring ridges, with fantastic knolls and peaks, and sharp ragged spurs, absolutely treeless and waterless. The fauna also changes; the tawny desert-partridge takes the place of the red-legged Greek species, common in other districts. The ibex succeeds the gazelle, and many birds unknown in other parts of Palestine are here abundant. The people also are a distinct race; their language is as different from that of the peasantry as is broad Scotch from Devonshire dialect; their habits, dress, dwellings and traditions are those of an entirely different people.
Everything in this desert is of one colour—a tawny yellow. The rocks, the partridges, the camels, the foxes, the ibex, are all of this shade, and only the dark Bedawîn and their black tents are distinguishable in the general glare.
The convent of Mar Saba stands on the south side of the huge fissure or gorge called the Valley of Fire, by which the water from Jerusalem comes down to the Dead Sea. East of it is a plateau between mountains on the west side and precipices rising eight hundred feet from the shores of the lake on the east. This plateau is also of waterworn marl with innumerable ridges, knolls, peaks, ravines, and iron crags around it.
It was from a “Tubg” or terrace, east of the plateau, that we first looked down on that marvellous sea (1300 feet lower than the Mediterranean), which swallows up all Jordan and all the snows of Hermon, and yet has no outlet, but yearly gives off the surplus supply in the heavy steam of evaporating water, which in summer hides it in a hot haze.
The morning sun cast purple, dusky shadows over the great mountains to the east, leaving patches of bright light on their level summits. The high piles of cumulus rose, in silvery brilliancy, above a long grey base of stratus cloud. The sea itself lay unruffled by a single breath of wind, blue and glossy, shining like oil, with long bands of white scum here and there stretching across it. The foreground was yet more extraordinary—fawn-coloured marl with bands of dark brown flint, in a tumbled confusion of cones and knolls, without a single tree or shrub, but streaked, on the north, with a pinkish colour, and capped with harder limestone. Part of this district still bears, among the Bedawîn, the title ’Amrîyeh, which represents the Hebrew Amorah or Gomorrah. A few scattered ruins exist on the plateau, and the Arabs have a tradition that these are remains of vineyards, which once existed, according to them, throughout this scorched and desolate solitude.
The hills west of the plateau are well worthy of notice. They consist of hard brown limestone, and I discovered a feature of great geological interest, in a fault which runs north and south, at the point where the white marl commences: showing that a violent, and probably sudden subsidence has here taken place, at a period so late (geologically speaking) as to be subsequent to the chalk era. The general bearing of this observation on the history of the lake, will be noticed in a subsequent chapter.
The heat was terrible. Not only was the actual temperature high, but not a blade of grass nor a breath of wind gave relief. The caves were the only places where any shade could be found, and they were even hotter than the glaring desert. There are probably few places in Asia where the sun beats down with as fierce and irresistible a power as in the Desert of Judah.
The western mountains, above the plateau, form a long ridge running north and south, the highest point of which is called El Muntâr, the “watch tower,” while the rest is named El Hadeidûn. A steep slope, unbroken save by precipices, comes sheer down from the top to the plateau, and the mountain is barren and fawn-coloured like the rest of the country. Now this hill, as I afterwards found out, is a place of historical interest, and the story is as follows:
According to the Law of Moses the Scapegoat was led to the wilderness and there set free. This was not, however, the practice of the later Jews. A scapegoat had once come back to Jerusalem, and the omen was thought so bad that the ordinary custom was modified, to prevent the recurrence of such a calamity. The man who led the goat arrived at a high mountain, called Sook, and there was at this place a rolling slope, down which he pushed the unhappy animal, which was shattered to atoms in the fall.