While we rambled on the beach in search of bitumen or sulphur, we suddenly heard a furious screaming in the direction of our tents, and hastily returning, found a number of strangers coming down a winding path. Our men were gathered together, and armed. The captain also examined the state of his double-barrelled pistols. However, on their arrival, the newcomers were recognised as people not hostile to the Jehâleen, and their general location is near ’Ain ’Aroos. So, after some squabbling and arrangement, they agreed to share our supper with us in peace. Had the case been otherwise, our position was not an enviable one; for we were shut in between their hills and the sea, they were more numerous than our Arabs, and they had entire command of our spring of water. Our camels, too, were all unloaded, and the packages scattered on the ground.
The scenery was desolate and gloomy in the extreme, undoubtedly blasted by the wrath of Almighty God, although a place which had at one time been “well watered everywhere . . . even as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt,” (Gen. xiii. 10;) and it required strong faith to expect the possibility of this “wilderness” (’Arabah) being again made “like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord,” (Isa. li. 3.) Indeed, that
promise does not seem to apply to this peculiar locality, by comparing it with Ezek. xlvii. 10, 11, although these unwholesome waters are to be healed, and are to have fish of various kinds in them, with fishermen’s nets employed there.
It deserves observation, that now the sea is so utterly lifeless that the American explorers there were unable, by the most powerful microscopes, to find any animalculæ in its water. Yet Lynch was of opinion that the atmosphere or vapour there was not in any way prejudicial to human health; and since then, Mr Holman Hunt spent a considerable time near the brink without injury derived from it.
The air was very warm all night, with no freshening dew, and the sound of slow, rippling water on the strand, during the still starlight hours, was one to which our ears had not been of late accustomed.
The Arab figures and conversation round the watch-fire were romantic enough. Thermometer at eight p.m., 90½° Fahrenheit.
April 10th.—Sunrise, Fahrenheit 70¼°. In taking this last note of the thermometer at sunrise, I may observe that the marking of it at that moment gives but a feeble idea of the heat that we experienced during the days’ marches throughout this excursion,—the temperature rapidly increased after sunrise, and at later hours within the confined hollows, such as Petra and the basin of the Dead Sea, rose to that of (I suppose) an Indian climate—but above all the effects of heat
was that produced by the weight of atmospheric pressure at probably the lowest position in the whole surface of the globe: about 1300 feet below the Mediterranean.
Before six o’clock we were on the march, over broken and precipitous rocky paths, on which the progress was slow and toilsome. Then down again upon the beach. I am sure that if the Dead Sea were already covering the ground that it now does, before the time of Chedorlaomer, the “four kings against five” could not possibly have mustered or manœuvred their armies on any side or place between the mountains on each side of the water. [332] At a quarter past seven the thermometer stood at 86° Fahrenheit.
There is always a close, heavy heat in this depressed region, inducing profuse perspiration.