At length we commenced the march, leaving the kawwâs to look for the cloak, (which, however, he did not succeed in recovering; it would be a prize for the thieves of the village, or even, if it should fall in their way, for one of the Bashi-bozuk,) and got to ’Ain Feshkah, much in need of a real breakfast. There the water was found to be too brackish for use—as unpalatable, probably, as the water of ’Ain es Sultân was before being healed by the prophet Elisha; so we drank native wine instead of coffee, while seated among tall reeds of the marshy ground, and not pleased with the mephitic odour all around us.
Our photographers having ascertained the site for their researches by means of the guide, and by the indications furnished in the work of De Saulcy; they set themselves to work, during which they were frequently uttering ejaculations at the exaggerations of size and quantity made by my French friend. The cyclopean ruins seemed to
us nothing but remnants of water-courses for irrigation of plantations, such as may be seen in the neighbourhood of Elisha’s fountain, or heaps of boulders, etc., that had been rolled down from the adjacent cliffs by natural causes during a succession of ages.
Mr Isaacs has since published a book descriptive of this expedition, containing illustrations from his photographs taken on the spot. In this he has given the reasons for our differing from M. de Saulcy, and considering his theories unfounded.
At the end of a strip of beach, which the discoverer calls “the plain,” the cliffs have a narrow crevasse, down which water rushes in the season when there is water to form a cascade. This is difficult to reach from “the plain,” and very narrow; and it is what our Arabs called the Wadi Gumrân. In front of this opening is a hill with some ruins upon it; thither we mounted easily, and saw vestiges of some ancient fort with a cistern.
When all the observations were taken upon points considered necessary, we prepared to return home by way of Mar Saba, hardly expecting to arrive by daylight at Jerusalem. We were, however, desirous of spending Christmas day there rather than in the bleak wilderness.
On the way we fortunately got some camel’s milk from a party passing near us. The weather was hot, but exceedingly clear. The Salt
mountain of Sodom, (Khash’m Usdum,) showed itself well at the southern extremity of the lake, thirty miles distant; and from a raised level near its northern end we gained superb views of Mount Hermon (Jebel esh Shaikh) in the Anti-Lebanon, capped with snow. This was entirely unexpected and gratifying; but I could nowhere find a spot from which both Hermon and Sodom could be seen at once. Perhaps such a view may be had somewhere on the hills.
We turned aside through the Wadi Dubber, as the guide termed it, within a circuitous winding, out of which, at a spot called ’Ain Merubba’, I had passed a night in the open air some years before.
Long, dreary, and tiresome was the journey; the two Bashi-bozuk men complained of it as much as we did. At sunset we came to a well with some water left in troughs near it, but not enough for all our horses, and we had no means of getting more out of the well. This was in a wide, treeless, trackless wilderness.