The geographical formation of the land and its strange colouring lend themselves to the spectral and the uncanny. The Dead Sea presents the most sinister landscape in the world. The opening paragraphs of Scott’s Talisman, founded upon the description of Josephus, are certainly overdrawn, yet in truth everything conspires to produce a sense of ghostliness by these unearthly shores. A ring of “scalded hills” encircles them, and a perpetual haze lies upon their waters. Their soil is nitrous and their springs sulphurous. Blocks of asphalt lie among their shingle; and fish, dead and salted, are cast up by the waves. There is little life visible about them, whether of man or beast or bird. Here and there the tempting Apple of Sodom grows, to appearance the most luscious of fruits, but so dry that its core is combustible and is used as tinder by the Arabs. A few feet above the summer level of the sea runs an unbroken line of drift-wood washed down by winter floods and left white and sparkling with crusted salt.
Yet it was not the Dead Sea that seemed to us most unearthly, but that more famous lake of which one thinks so differently. It would be a curious and instructive task to collect the various impressions which the Sea of Galilee has made upon travellers. Romance and piety conspire to furnish many of its visitors with a predisposition to find it surpassingly beautiful; and not a little could be quoted which owes most of its touches to the imagination of the writer. A natural rebellion against this has led to no less exaggerated expressions of disappointment, and to accusations of ugliness which are simply untrue. The fact is that ordinary canons of description are of no avail here. The Sea of Galilee, even so far as natural appearance goes, must be judged by itself.
Journeying to it from Tabor, you ride across a rather characterless tract of country. A jackal, a stray Circassian horseman, a low black tent of the Bedawin, are the only signs of life. Suddenly the track, sweeping up over the farther side of a shallow and rudely cultivated valley, lands you on an unexpected edge, from which the ground falls sheer away before you into the basin of the lake. This is not scenery; it is tinted sculpture, it is jewel-work on a gigantic scale. The rosy flush of sunset was on it when we caught the first glimpse. At our feet lay a great flesh-coloured cup full of blue liquor; or rather the whole seemed some lapidary’s quaint fancy in pink marble and blue-stone. There was no translucency, but an aggressive opaqueness, in sea and shore alike. The dry atmosphere showed everything in sharpest outline, clear-cut and broken-edged. There was no shading or variety of colour, but a strong and unsoftened contrast. To be
THE TOMB OF RACHEL.
On the road from Jerusalem to Hebron. It is stated in the 35th chapter of Genesis that Rachel died and was buried in the way to Hebron (Ephrath).
quite accurate, there was one break—a splash of white, with the green suggestion of trees and grass, lying on the water’s edge directly beneath us—Tiberias.
When, next day, we sailed upon the lake, coasting along the western shore from north to south, we found ourselves again as far removed from anything we had seen or experienced before. A casual glance showed utter and abject desolation, and a silence that might be heard oppressed the spirit. As the eye grew more accustomed, villages were discerned. But what villages! With the same exception of Tiberias, they were brown slabs of flat-roofed cubical hovels—let into the slope of the shore or the foot-hills. And as we skirted closer along the beach, we descried everywhere traces of ruined architecture. It appeared to form a continuous ring of towers; columns broken and tumbled, but showing elaborately carved capitals; aqueducts and retaining walls; fragments of all sorts, and apparently of widely different styles of architecture. Foliage is scanty, save for the thorn-trees and bamboo canes in which the carved stones are often half buried. Here and there a plantation of orchard trees hides a trim little German garden. At Tiberias a few palm trees lend their graceful suggestion of the Far East.
All this impresses one in a quite unique way. You try to reconstruct the past—rebuild the castles and synagogues and palaces, and imagine the life that sent forth its fleets upon the lake in the days of Jesus. Or you more daringly attempt the future landscape, and imagine these hillsides as scientific cultivation and the withdrawal of oppressive government may yet make them. But from it all you are driven back upon the extraordinary present—petrified, uncanny, spectral—a part of the earth on which some spell has fallen, and over which some ghostly influence broods, silencing the daylight, and whispering in the darkness. If, however, this sense of the ghostly be intenser here than elsewhere, it is but an exaggeration of the spirit of the whole land.