270 Naturalist at Large 



the Dead Sea Valley is damp with the evaporation of the 

 surface of the great lake. The Jordan River pours into 

 the upper end of the Dead Sea but there is no outlet except 

 by evaporation. The temperature in the valley, surrounded 

 by broken hills and 1500 feet below the level of the sea, in 

 August is grotesque. 



Jacob's Well is very impressive. How this rock-cut tube 

 but a couple of feet in diameter and enormously deep was 

 ever hollowed out by primitive man is hard to understand, 

 but made it was and down it reaches to water which is cold 

 and crystal clear. It is near Nablus, where the poor, tu- 

 berculosis-ridden remnant of the Samaritans still walk the 

 streets. 



Nazareth is lovely, the Sea of GaUlee a gem, and the site 

 of Capernaum perhaps the most charming of all. 



Before we motored down to Haifa to embark we went 

 out to the Cave of El Athlit at the Wadi El Mughara. The 

 British Museum has been digging here for some years in 

 an extensive cave. A number of Neanderthaloid skeletons 

 have been recovered, and picking around the sides of the 

 excavation I fished out a jaw of a red deer and the bony 

 scute which once underlaid the scale of a crocodile. This 

 simply served to bring to mind the fact that the British 

 Museum had found remains of hippopotamus and a wide 

 variety of other African animals in this region which now 

 is too completely bare to support much of any wild life — 

 mice and a few foxes at best. I wonder if the fact that man 

 took the goat into domestication in this general area is not 

 the reason for all this barrenness. Goats and goatherds still 

 roam the landscape as they have undoubtedly been doing 

 for several thousand years, and the fact that goats can gnaw 



