At this point the Jordan reaches the level of the Mediterranean, but instead of maintaining it, the river makes a sudden drop on leaving the lake, cutting for itself a deeply grooved channel. It has a fall of some 300 feet before reaching the Lake of Grenesareth, where it is only momentarily arrested, as if to gather fresh strength for its headlong career southwards.
Drawn by Boudier, from several photographs brought back by
Lortet.
Here and there it makes furious assaults on its right and left banks, as if to escape from its bed, but the rocky escarpments which hem it in present an insurmountable barrier to it; from rapid to rapid it descends with such capricious windings that it covers a course of more than 62 miles before reaching, the Dead Sea, nearly 1300 feet below the level of the Mediterranean.*
* The exact figures are: the Lake of Hûleh 7 feet above the
Mediterranean; the Lake of Genesareth 68245 feet, and the
Dead Sea 1292 feet below the sea-level; to the south of
the Dead Sea, towards the water-parting of the Akabah, the
ground is over 720 feet higher than the level of the Red
Sea.
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by the Duc de Luynes.
Nothing could offer more striking contrasts than the country on either bank. On the east, the ground rises abruptly to a height of about 3000 feet, resembling a natural rampart flanked with towers and bastions: behind this extends an immense table-land, slightly undulating and intersected in all directions by the affluents of the Jordan and the Dead Sea—the Yarmuk,* the Jabbok,** and the Arnon.***